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A 

Short History of France 

From Caesar's Invasion to the 
Battle of Waterloo 



^ By 



^^^^Y^^' Mary Duclaux 



(A. Mary F. Robinson) 



With Maps 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

Xlbe f^nicTietbocRer ^xess 

1918 



rip 

4u. .. 



Copyright, 1918 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



MAY 1 1 1918 



Ube VtnfcFierbociter presa, new lt?oth 



©CI,A494972 



"Reges regnant suffragio populorum." — Milon de 

DORMANS. 

"Tere de France, mult estes dulz pais." — Chanson de 
Roland. 

" Le Gaulois semble au saule verdissant; 
Plus on le coupe et plus il est naissant, 
Et rejetonne en branches davantage, 
Prenant vigueur de son propre dommage." 

RONSARD. 

"Toute la suite des hommes pendant le cours des 
siecles doit ^tre consider^e comme un meme homme qui 
subsiste toujours et qui. apprend continuellement." — 
Pascal. 

"La France etemelle." — Victor Hugo. 



Ui 



FOREWORD 

I HAVE written this little book, having in my mind's eye 
neither schoolboys nor historians, though I should in- 
deed be proud if one and the other gave it their approval; 
but I had in view the class of cultivated and ignorant 
men and women to which I myself belong, and meant to 
offer them such a book as I wish some one would write 
for me about Russia or Rumania or Serbia or even the 
United States. For thirty years and more the history 
of France has been my hobby, and I have read a good 
deal more of it than I have quoted ; I have a fair library, 
and access to the hospitable bookshelves of my friends ; 
— it seemed to me, therefore, that I was cut out for this 
particular form of war-work. 

Of course, my little book is far from complete — partly 
on purpose; I have some qualms about a chapter on 
Philippe-le-Bel which I deliberately sacrificed because 
he seemed to me too prominent a personage to stand so 
far back. I have tried above all for unity, and to give a 
complete impression — the distance left in mass while the 
figures nearer our own times stand out in fuller relief. 

So far as it goes, I hope it is accurate. The picture 
might be better, yet the painter has taken great pains, 
out of love and infinite respect for her two countries, 
the two great countries of Europe. 

Paris, . 
November, 191 7. 



CONTENTS 




PART I 




THE ROMAN TRADITION 

CHAPTER 

I. — The Romans in Gaul 


PAGE 

3 


II. — The Gallo-Romans .... 


8 


III. — The Church in Gaul 


. i6 


IV.— The Kingdom of Toulouse 


. 21 


V. — The Kingdom of France . 


. 28 


VI.— The French Language 


. 33 



PART II 
FEUDAL SOCIETY 
I. — The Rise of Feudalism .... 41 
II. — Chivalry 55 

III.— The Communes or Towns' Unions: Rise of 

the Middle Class 60 



IV. — The First Renaissance 
V. — The Hundred Years' War 
VI. — Deliverance 



65 

77 
91 



VIU 



CONTENTS 



PART III 
THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

CHAPTER 

I. — The Renaissance 

II. — The Wars of Religion 
III. — The Century of Louis XIV 
IV. — The Eighteenth Century . 

v.— Louis XVI 
VI. — The Fall of the Monarchy 

PART IV 
THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

I. — The Reign of Terror 
II. — The Coming of Bonaparte 
III. — Napoleon . . . . 
IV. — The Return of the Bourbons 
V. — The Hundred Days . 
VI. — Waterloo .... 
Epilogue .... 
Index. . ^ . . 



lOI 

114 
132 
152 
167 

184 



221 

248 
268 
298 
308 
320 
333 
339 



MAPS 

PAGE 

Europe in 485, Showing the Territories of the 

Goths . . . . . . . -23 

France before the Crusades . . . .69 

France during the Hundred Years* War. . 97 

The French Empire in 1810 .... 290 



ix 



PART I 
THE ROMAN TRADITION 

"En toute chose, consid^rez les origines." — Ernest Renan„ 
"Look to the roots of thing." — Ernest Renan. 



CHAPTER I 
THE ROMANS IN GAUL 

"Gallia duas res industriosissime persequitur, rem militarem et 
arguti loqui." — M. Porcius Caton, Origines, lib. ii. 

Two thousand years ago the name of France was 
Gaul. 

When Julius Caesar invaded the country, some fifty 
years before the birth of Christ, he found it divided 
into three principal parts: there was Aquitaine, the 
land of springs and waters, extending, in the south- 
west, from the ocean to the Garonne, already a land 
of pleasant life, rich in commerce and refinement; 
there was Celtic Gaul, the west, which reached from 
the Atlantic to the Marne and the Seine; and there 
was Belgian Gaul (as Caesar calls it), that north-eastern 
space between the Seine and the Rhine: an expanse 
which roughly corresponds to the provinces devastated 
by the Great War. Metz, Toul, Verdun, Soissons, 
Chalons, Saint-Quentin, Arras, Toumai, Cambrai, 
Noyon, Beauvais, Amiens, and Boulogne were even 
then the towns of Belgian Gaul. And the inhabitants 
of these districts, said the Roman General, are braver 
than any others "because not corrupted by the culture 
and humanities of the Roman Province [that is to say 
Provence, already completely Latinized] nor made 
effeminate by the passage of our merchants." 

3 



4 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

If Caesar could revisit France to-day, he would find 
these essential differences stUl existent. The man 
from the Garonne, eloquent, able, versatile, fond of 
his ease, seems made by nature for a lawyer or a mer- 
chant; his neighbour from Celtic Gaul, the Breton 
sailor or the farmer from Anjou, is gentle, obstinate, 
and dreamy, careless of comfort or success — ever 
dependent on something beyond the facts of life: 
religion, poetry, politics, or drink. But these sons 
of Martha and these sons of Mary have more in com- 
mon than either has with the man from the north-east, 
the keen, calculating, sparing Picard or Lorrainer, ad- 
mirable in any battlefield, not only on account of his 
fierce courage, but because of his capacity for discipline, 
still as of old "horum omnium fortissimus." 

Coming from Italy to conquer first Gaul, and then 
the German tribes, Cassar was struck by the differ- 
ence in the worlds that reach from the two banks 
of the Rhine, and suddenly struck out an idea which, 
since then, has made much stir in the world: that the 
Rhine was the natural frontier of Gaul. On the left 
bank were studded villages with their fields and gar- 
dens, for the Celts were builders and agriculturists. 
Industry and prosperity reigned in their settlements, 
great were their ingenuity and order, and they would 
have been richer and more admirable still but for their 
extraordinary taste for civil conflict, for wars and ru- 
mours of wars, for party strife and turbulent agitation. 
The Gauls were ever lovers of a new thing, "omnes 
fere Gallos novis rebus studere.'' Any change was wel- 
come, and especially a change in the direction of stir 
and strife. 

"In Gaul [writes Caesar] not only every town, but 
every village and countryside is divided into opposite 



THE ROMANS IN GA UL 5 

factions. And indeed almost every family is thus 
split up into two camps, each with a chief who protects 
his partisans." 

And he says that this excess of party feeling is doubt- 
less due to the independent spirit of the Gallic race, 
consumed by a passion for equality, constantly alarmed 
lest they suffer the oppression of the great, "for none 
of them wiU bear any sort of tyranny or management; 
and they think their factions will protect them against 
the despotism of the upper class. Anyhow the custom 
obtains throughout the whole of Gaul, and you will 
find there no city that is not split in twain." 

And yet this people, always taking sides, was bound 
in a social order of singular coherence and dignity. 
These independent, touchy folk — these often insolent 
Gauls — possessed great qualities of reverence and 
firmness. They loved their traditions. Their turbu- 
lent democracy respected two classes of men: their 
Church and their army, their Druids and their knights. 
But the Druids were something more than a Church, 
magistrates as much as priests, men of science accord- 
ing to the capacity of their time. Their seminaries 
were the equivalent of our universities. "The move- 
ment of the stars, the immensity of the universe, the 
nature of things, the power and force of the immortal 
gods, form the subject of their debates and of the 
theories which they transmit to the young." 

These men of Gaul, so reasonable already, with their 
taste and instinct for philosophy — these ancestors of 
Pascal, Descartes, Malebranche, Voltaire — were none 
the less in the eyes of the practical Italian, extraordi- 
narily superstitious, "too much addicted to religion," 
he says, "Natio est omnium Gallorum admodum dedita 
religionibus." And the geographer Pomponius Mela 



6 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

also remarks that they are "gentis superbcB, super sti- 
tios(E." It is indeed a constant trait of the race. The 
limits that divide the impossible from the merely un- 
precedented barely exist for the French. Miracles, 
wonders, marvels, are to them merely an extension of 
Nature. I think that is the reason the French are so 
great in physical science. Caesar already noted their 
extraordinary inventiveness, their adroitness in experi- 
ment, but this of course is but the body of science; 
the soul of it lies in that imagination which constantly 
extends the limits of the possible. The same Pascal 
who accepts the miracle of the Holy Thorn invents 
the barometer and discovers the laws of hydrostatics; 
Curie, the finder of radio-activity, was deeply in- 
terested in the medium Eusapia Paladino ; Pasteur was 
an orthodox Catholic. A strong vein of religiosity may 
complicate the mind of the physicist without impairing 
its lucidity. Even to-day Csesar might remark the 
haunting frequency of immaterial influences, the sense 
of forces just behind the veil, the religious scruple, and 
confidence, and deprecation, which still distinguish so 
many ofahe children of the Druids, exciting (since there 
are always two parties in Gaul) a corresponding energy 
of materialism in the other half of the nation. 

All this was changed when Caesar crossed the Rhine. 
The Germans seemed to him to have no religion at 
all: no gods, no cultus, no ritual or tradition. They 
believed only in such things as they could see or feel: 
natural objects, the Sun, the Moon, or Thunder. They 
had no priests; the Druids had no counterpart on the 
further side of the Rhine. In Gavl, Caesar had found 
a form of worship comprehensible to him, not unlike 
the other State religions of the time: Mercury, Jupi- 
ter, Venus, or their equivalents. The Germans were 



THE ROMANS IN GAUL 7 

different. These two peoples, sprung apparently from 
the same soil, were hopelessly divided so soon as they 
raised their eyes to heaven. In the eyes of the Ger- 
mans, the King was the sole High Priest, and, after 
Nature, War the only god. Among their many altars 
the Gauls raised one to Teuta: the People, the City, 
as we should say the State. The Germans had no 
thought of such a collectivity, but they would die for 
their leader. 

War was their real idol; the Germans were rovers, 
roaming from place to place with no abiding city. 
They had no fields, no gardens of their own. It was 
even forbidden to hedge round and till a private plot, 
lest the magic of possession dull a man's zest for war. 
Great were their virtues; they were patient, sparing, 
chaste, and long-enduring — but thieves to a man. 
They held it no crime to plunder a neighbouring tribe. 
And they were arrogant, with a rougher, ruder arro- 
gance than the charming impertinence of Gaul. They 
could bear no equal within a day's journey of them. 
The lands beyond their forest fastnesses were a wil- 
derness of desolation ; for the Germans held it an honour 
that no man should endure their vicinity. They 
loved to reign supreme, and the emptiness and solitude 
of a ravaged desert seemed to them fairer than all the 
gardens and orchards of the Gauls. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

/ Julius C^sar: Commentaries. 

PoMPONius Mela: De Situ Orbis. 

Camille Jullian: Vercengetorix. 

D'Arbois de Jubainville: Les Premiers Habitants de I'Europe. 



CHAPTER II 

THE GALLO-ROMANS : BORDEAUX 

When the Romans burst in their order and their 
splendour into Gaul, they found before them a people, 
not savage indeed, but individualized to the verge of 
incoherence. The Gauls were brave, "soldiers to a 
man, and at every age," as Ammianus puts it. But 
they were undisciplined and disunited. The Romans 
were at least as brave, very hard, dour, and persever- 
ing fighters, and they were admirably organized. 
Therefore in the space of eight years Julius Csesar 
conquered Gaul. And on their new possessions the 
Romans imposed the system of their culture so pro- 
foundly that to-day the French remain a Latin nation 
as conspicuously as they are a Celto-Frankish race. 

The Roman system of conquest differed from that 
of most of the peoples of antiquity; it ennobled rather 
than humiliated. Rome imposed her rule on the 
vanquished; she neither enslaved nor exterminated. 
Her armies overwhelmed a country like a fertilizing 
tide, and then retired to Rome, leaving behind them 
her social organization, her municipal system, her 
culture, and her language. In exchange, she accorded 
to the towns included in her Empire the rights of Ro- 
man citizenship. The Gallo-Roman cities sent dele- 
gates to the metropolis, who voted there on questions 

8 



THE GALLO-ROMANS : BORDEAUX 9 

of war and state and Empire on the same terms as 
other Roman citizens; while, in Gaul, each town pre- 
served a certain measure of Home Rule, choosing its 
own religious worship, ordaining its priests and regu- 
lating its ceremonies, electing its civic magistrates, 
administering its own estates and revenues, and de- 
ciding all questions of purely local interest. If in 
any respect the towns outran their due limits, Rome 
proceeded with vigour (as against the Christians of 
Lyons in A.D. 177), but her system was to prefer an 
occasional persecution in punishment of an excess to 
any sequence of preventive measures. 

After some ineffectual revolts and revolutions, the 
Gauls yielded to the prestige of the Universal City; 
with every generation they admired her more whole- 
heartedly; and by the fourth century most of them 
could say with Ausonius : "Romam colo" — "Rome is 
my religion." 

And indeed Rome had done much for Gaul. From 
Treves in the north to Bordeaux in the south, and 
the magnificent villas by the Mediterranean Sea, her 
rough military towns, her homely farms and fields, 
had been changed into marvellous gardens, into cities 
with aqueducts and amphitheatres and temples no less 
splendid or lovely than those of Rome herself. And 
all this with no rude displacing of beloved landmarks. 
Take for an example Autun, the Druids' town: the 
Romans made of it a great centre of their civilization; 
the school of rhetoric of Autun was reckoned to fur- 
nish the most brilliant orators of the Empire; its monu- 
ments were beautiful. But the old faith was not 
ousted or treated with contempt. The grandfather 
of the poet Ausonius was a Druid, and, in the middle 
of the fourth century, discoursed of the secrets of the 



10 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

stars and delivered justice according to the ancient 
Celtic rites; walking in the streets of Autun, the good 
man might encounter the augurs of Mercury, or some 
deacon from the Christian Church established in the 
town since the first decades of the Christian Era. 
They were all citizens of the Empire, and equals. 

It is difficult for us to form an idea of life in the 
Roman Empire : such an immense federation of peoples 
associated in an enchantment of material prosperity. 
Peace and power spread out such mighty wings that 
the races of the earth were harboured under them. 
And the national idea seemed abolished. The Greeks 
of Marseilles, the large Syrian colonies of Lyons the 
great industrial city on the Rhone, were as much at 
home in Gaul as the Romans or the Celts themselves. 
The conquered nations felt no barrier between them 
and supremacy: were not the Emperors Vespasian and 
Titus of Gaulish origin? If, for example, we glance 
for an instant at the genealogy of that Druid of Autun, 
we perceive how rapid was the ascension of a man of 
talent and how far-reaching the attraction of Rome. 
Csecilius Arbor himself had been an unsuccessful per- 
son: a noble Druid, compromised in the revolt of 
Victorinus, he fled from Autun to Aquitaine in the 
concluding years of the third century, and, in his new 
home at Bordeaux, fotind his Celtic lore and Druid 
philosophy of such scant account that, in order to 
earn his children's bread, he was obliged to practise 
more remunerative accomplishments, such as fortune- 
telling and astrology. It is probable that Csecilius 
Arbor was never quite at home in that splendid Gallo- 
Roman Bordeaux, nor did he express himself easily in 
Latin, but used in his home circle some Celtic dialect and 
considered Greek the natural language of philosophy. 



THE GALLO-ROMANS : BORDEA UX 1 1 

His son, however, Emilius Magnus Arbor, Professor 
of Rhetoric at the University of Bordeaux, was the 
glory of the bar of Toulouse and one of the great Latin 
orators of his time. The men of Gaul were famous 
for their eloquence. The echo of Emilius Arbor's 
gift spread through the Empire till, at Constantinople, 
the Emperor heard of him and sent for the Gaulish 
barrister to educate his son. 

Meanwhile, EmUius's sister had married a young 
doctor of Bordeaux, one Julius Ausonius, a specialist 
in rheumatic diseases. Their son, Decimus Magnus 
Ausonius, was the Latin poet, dear to all who have a 
secret attachment to minor verse. But, for the case 
in point, it is more important that Ausonius, the Druid's 
grandson, shoidd have been the Governor of the 
Emperor Gratian, a Count of the Empire, First Consul 
of the year 379, Prefect of Africa, Prefect of Italy, 
and Prefect of the Gauls. 

Thanks to Ausonius, who, bom in 309, lived till 
the closing years of the fourth century — thanks to the 
excellent descriptive poet and letter-writer — we can 
form a living idea of what Gaul looked like under the 
Emperors Constantine, Valentinian, and Gratian. 
Even more than other ages, that age was a period of 
transition. The Roman Empire reigned supreme on 
the solid Roman roads that ran, from Bordeaux, for 
example to Paris, to Treves, to Spain, to Rome, and 
(with a marine interval) to Jerusalem. The carriages 
and horses of Gaul were far renowned; there was a 
mail-post; in fact, the service of the road was far 
better than it was to be in the Middle Ages and much 
as it existed at the date of the invention of railroads. 
For the men of the Roman Empire were no stay-at- 
homes; they were continually upon their beautiful 



U THE ROMAN TRADITION 

roads: soldiers, officials, or travellers. As you ap- 
proached the towns, there, too, the magnificence of 
Rome was apparent in its state: villas whose vast 
constructions, faced by flowery porticoes and peri- 
styles, crowned terraced gardens, where fountains 
played and statues gleamed among the greenery; 
there were noble monuments, baths, theatres, temples; 
among the farming villages there stood some modest 
Christian church. The grandson of Ausonius, Pauli- 
nus of Pella, gives us an excellent idea of a country 
house in Gaul at the end of the fourth century: "All 
that I asked in my youth [says he] was a comfortable 
mediocrity; for instance, a commodious villa with a 
double set of apartments disposed to the south for use 
in winter, and open to the north for summer-time; 
a well-furnished table; many slaves and in the flower 
of their youth ; furniture of all sorts in great profusion ; 
silver plate more precious for its workmanship than 
for its weight; among the staff of servants, artists of 
several sorts, quick to execute my fancies and devices ; 
good stables full of horses and carriages of various 
sorts for driving. ' ' Paulinus says nothing of his library, 
but we know that Ausonius, his grandfather, was rich 
both in books and in instruments of music. 

But as the traveller neared the towns of Gaul all this 
antique state and space and splendour shrank and 
changed: the cities of the reign of Constantine were 
the narrow, stifling cities of the early Middle Ages. 
For already the Barbarians had begun their inroads. 
The beautiful open cities of antiquity, spread largely 
on the plain, with spacious streets interspersed with 
gardens, with colossal temples, baths, porticoes, amphi- 
theatres, were things of yesterday; many of these 
monuments still existed (since some of them remain 



THE GALLO-ROMANS : BORDEAUX 13 

to-day), but outside the city walls, scattered among the 
vineyards. And the towns themselves had shrunken 
into fortresses with huge encircling walls garnished 
with towers: the towers of Bordeaux (said Ausonius) 
"pierce the clouds." The port was rich and busy, 
doing already a large trade in wine with England; 
the University was no less brilliant than it is to-day 
(Ausonius has left an agreeable gallery of portraits of 
the professors), but Bordeaux was no longer pleasant 
as a residential place; it had sadly fallen off from the 
antique enchantment, the exquisite urbanity, of the 
grandeur that was Rome. 

This Roman Gaul of Constantine and Valentinian 
and their successors, with the Barbarian at the gates, 
was already full of the promise of the Middle Ages. 
The attempt of Julian to bring back the ancient gods 
had failed; though the landed nobility still clung to 
his device (they chng to it to-day, with a difference), 
and rallied to the cry : "•ud xaxpta eOiQ, toD? xaxptouq vo^xouq, 
Tov xatptov 0e6v." 

They, indeed, were full of fidelity and faith to the 
traditions, the laws, and the religion of their fore- 
fathers; they were soldiers, believers; but on all sides 
the Christian ideas were acting as a ferment, trans- 
forming society. Now, in the eyes of the Gallo- 
Roman nobles, no Christian could be a patriot, for 
the soul of patriotism was, to these men of yesterday, 
the great cultus of Rome and of Augustus which seemed 
to them the very cement that built and welded Gallic 
unity. 

Yet, with the Barbarian at the gates, the Christians 
preached pacifism, non-resistance; they were indeed a 
peril in the State, more dangerous than men of violence 
— at least, the ultra-Christians, the party of the Saints, 



14 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

those who, like Paulinus of Nola, besought their friends 
to desert in face of the enemy and to give themselves 
up to the salvation of their souls. There were many- 
such: men who would not wear a sword or an arrow 
cut on the onyx of their ring; men who said, "We 
cannot serve two masters," and who left the army as a 
necessary consequence of their baptism; men of whom 
(seeing the danger of the Empire) we instinctively 
disapprove, until we suddenly remember that, since 
then, they have all been canonized — that they are called 
Paulinus of Pella, Paulinus of Nola, Sulpicius Severus, 
Saint Martin of Tours, TertuUian, Saint Ambrose, 
Saint Augustine. All of them stand now in the ranks 
of the Orthodox; with them, and not with the Roman 
centurions and senators, lay the future of Europe. 

The insidious dissolving element of saintly enthu- 
siasm was doubtless one cause of the final undoing of 
the Roman Empire, which seemed as indestructible 
as its own monuments, yet crumbled at a shock. An- 
other cause has already been indicated at the opening 
of this chapter: it was the complete divorce between 
local and imperial affairs. Political life and municipal 
life had nothing to do with each other. Although the 
cities of the provinces were extraordinarily free and 
prosperous, they had no voice in the administration of 
the Empire: Rome alone governed Rome. Rome 
sucked from all her subject countries, and drew to her 
own centre, the men of brain and will and energy who 
could serve her aims; absorbed them, estranged them 
from their origins; but the mass left behind in the 
great provincial towns, though it flourished happily 
and busily for its humbler ends and objects, was, from 
the point of view of the Empire, non-existent. Rome 
had but one head, and when that front was struck, 



THE GALLO-ROMANS : BORDEAUX 15 

insensibility and inertia spread throughout the vast 
body of the Empire. 

Or, to change our metaphor, these towns so solidly 
constituted, so separate, these rich municipalities are 
like round strong beads strung on a slender string. 
The fibre snaps, and the beads, in nowise destroyed, 
roll hither and thither, but form no longer a necklace. 
In the gradual disaggregation of the Roman Empire 
a quantity of little centres usurp the place of Rome: 
Milan, Sirmium, Treves, Aries, Paris, Vienne, Lyons; 
but they are local centres; they have no imperial sense. 
Little by little, the one real vital force that was left 
takes on more and more importance; the bishop be- 
comes the natural chief of the inhabitants and more 
than their mayor. His election is the great affair of 
the city. What still is left intact of the great Roman 
order is rescued and preserved by the clergy. Between 
the municipal system of the Romans and the municipal 
system of the mediaeval communes, the Church in the 
city guards and maintains a great tradition. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Same as above. 

The works of Ausonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Samuel Dill. 

Gaston Boissier: La Fin du Paganisme. 



CHAPTER III 

THE CHURCH IN GAUL : LYONS 

In the first century of our era, Christianity had pene- 
trated Gaul, but it was about a hundred and fifty years 
after the birth of Christ that the new religion sud- 
denly awoke and spread, with a rare force of enthu- 
siasm, among the poor industrial populations of the 
two great cities of the Rhone: Lyons and Vienne. 
A large Oriental colony was established in these places, 
Jews, Greeks, and Syrians, laborious, intelligent, and 
gentle. Their Gaulish neighbours, in adopting their 
ideas, gave them, as always happens, a twist in the 
direction of their own temperament — a temperament 
singularly romantic, superstitious, stoical, chivalrous, 
and ardent. And French Catholicism came into being. 
These Syrians of the Rhone knew little Latin and less 
Celtic; their tongue was Greek — much spoken at 
that date all through the south of Gaul, where the 
Greeks had settled long before the Romans knew 
anything of the country — and we may suppose that 
their religious instruction was often vague, perhaps 
half-understood, but the extraordinary fitness of the 
new ideas to the Gaulish temperament caused the 
religion to spread. The gods of Rome and Greece — 
nay, even the gods of Gaul — had never really satisfied 
the sons of the Druids; and this new faith, with its 

l6 



THE CHURCH IN GAUL : LYONS 17 

constant dependence on the invisible, its perpetual 
visions and miracles, its Paradise promised, its Saviour 
sacrificed, its unparalleled appeal to the heart and the 
imagination, seemed made to their measure; these 
Gauls — nervous, excitable, and yet at the same time 
heroic and stoical — rushed, we may say, on martyr- 
dom. They had not long to wait. 

Lyons was the centre, not only of the young Church 
of Christ, but also of the patriotic cult of Rome and of 
the Roman Emperor, regarded as the personification 
of the Empire. Small wonder that the two religions 
clashed. Gaul entered into the Church of Christ in 
a triumph of martyrdom; Lyons was crowded with 
saints and confessors: the bishop, Pothin; the simple 
believers, Maturus, Sanctus, Attains, and the little 
servant-girl, Blandine, were thrown to the wild beasts, 
after unutterable tortures, in the public amphitheatre, 
on the ist of August, a.d, 177. In the fury of convic- 
tion on both sides — of faith and cruelty on the part 
of the persecutors (absolutely certain of their cause), 
of faith and stoicism on the part of the martyred — 
we meet for the first time a paroxysm of sentiment 
which we shall encounter again and again in the course 
of the history of France. Blandine is the sister of 
Joan of Arc and of Madame RoUand. 

Smiling, and as if ignorant of her tortures, she en- 
dured the flagellation, the red-hot throne, the mauling 
mouths of the wild beasts, the tossings of the bull, and 
the final stroke of the sword. "Verily [said the Gauls] 
never in our country has a woman endured so much!" 
And, like those who were to burn the Maid of Orleans, 
then and there they felt dimly that they had put to 
death a saint. 

The worship of the saints, the veneration of their 



i8 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

tortured bodies and the treasuring of relics, were fea- 
tures of the new rehgion which, in superstitious Gaul, 
awoke the dreamiest fervours of Celtic enthusiasm. 
Miracles, visions, venerations, ecstasy, contempla- 
tion, added all their gamut of holiness to the teaching 
of the Gospel; it was not for nothing that Lyons 
became the religious capital of the Gauls. For Lyons 
was already Lyons. 

Nothing is more strange, in studying these early 
years of Christian Gaul, than to find the character of 
the different regions already so firmly fixed. The 
Bordeaux of Ausonius is already the Bordeaux of Mon- 
taigne — the Bordeaux of to-day: curious, intelligent, 
philosophic, sceptical, commercial. And the Lyons 
of Blandine is our Lyons, mystical, emotive, sensual, 
yet highly moral. 

The doctrines of Christ had taken on a tinge from 
the souls who received them. Nor was the intense 
individualism of the Gaul without its effect on the new 
religion. Martin of Tours, Paulinus of Nola, Sulpicius 
Severus — nearly all the early Gallic saints, began or 
finished their saintly lives as hermits, dwelling in 
grottos or huts, solitary, remote from the world they 
abandoned. Nothing could be more shocking to the 
Roman idea of virtue, which is always an active prin- 
ciple. Virtue, in Latin, is valour. But the early 
Church in Gaul was a Church of Mary, not a Church 
of Martha, and its device was : Unum est necessarium I 
The Celtic people of believers was too apt to sink into 
an incurable apathy, a profound indifference for all 
things beyond the circle of religion — much as we notice 
to-day in Moslem countries. Instead of grouping 
themselves round the State in peril, these new forces 
gathered apart under the shelter of the Church. And 



THE CHURCH IN GA UL : LYONS 19 

yet, in its next phase, the nation — that new thing, the 
nation (for the Roman Empire had ignored the prin- 
ciple of nationality) — the nation was to result from their 
religious cohesion and not from a political principle. 

Despite its force, its violence, and terror, the Roman 
Empire had instituted the greatest moral union as 
yet known to man: the inhabitants of the civilized 
world were all the brothers of one family, the dwellers 
in one home, the equal members of one society. They 
might well say with Ausonius: "Romam colo I" When 
the barbarians in their hordes overwhelmed and 
ruined the material power of Rome, the religious 
unity of the Empire was, as it were, rescued by Christi- 
anity, and transformed into the Catholic Church. 
The Empire had been a religion and a family of which 
the half-divine Emperor had been the head. The 
Rome of the Popes survived the Rome of the Emperors 
and offered to mankind the shelter of the Church. 
The Past never really dies: we may forget it, ignore it; 
but it continues to vivify our actions; and deep down 
in the soul of man we may discover, as in the geological 
strata of a rock, the different phases of being that have 
formed him. The Roman Empire was one phase 
of the progress of humanity. In every Western 
nation, and nowhere more than in France, the Roman 
Empire is still a living root of social life. 

For one thing, the Church preserved, almost unal- 
tered, the Roman system of education. The great 
Christian orators and bishops had all been educated 
in the schools that served for the Pagan aristocracy. 
Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, Boethius and 
Paulinus, had been grounded on Cicero and Seneca; 
Cicero and Seneca had entered into the marrow of 
their natures. They could not conceive life and letters 



20 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

without Cicero and Seneca. When Christianity be- 
came the religion of the Roman State, it did not occur 
to them to change the system of education. There 
were no other schools to take the place of the great, 
learned, and prosperous schools of the Latin rhetori- 
cians. And Christian Rome adopted, just as the 
centuries of Latin culture had left it, the pedagogy of 
the Pagans, introducing it, with the Roman adminis- 
tration, into all the conquered provinces. Taking 
root there, it survived the Empire itself. And that 
is why our sons to-day learn their Latin, not in the 
Vulgate, but in Virgil! 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 
Same as before. 

Renan : Origines du Christianisme, t, vL 
Thamin: Saint Amboine. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE KINGDOM OF TOULOUSE 

From the darkness of the Past these cities of the older 
France start into Hght, like the heads in some tarnished 
altar-piece before which a sacristan draws a lighted 
torch. But in what a lurid illumination we see the 
next, Toulouse: Toulouse, the century-long capital of 
the barbarian Visigoths ! 

Toulouse was an old town of the Celtic Tectosages, 
which existed probably many hundred of years before 
it was conquered by the Romans. It was always 
rich, not in the way of Lyons or Bordeaux, not as a 
great commercial centre, but rather as the depository 
and hoarding-place for the wealth of a vast agricultural 
region. Caesar noticed it as "situated in an open 
country which produces a great deal of grain." Now, 
every one wants corn, and the farmers of Toulouse 
easily exchanged their harvests against sacks of gold; 
but they needed little, living on their fertile fields; 
so the gold accumulated in the treasure-tanks and 
secret chambers of the Druids' temples; part of it, 
no doubt, placed there as it were in a bank, but a 
great deaj of it offered to the gods, for the yeomen 
and labourers of the region were religious — or, if you 
choose, superstitious — like all men who depend on 
the weather and the unguessed will of a Power above. 

21 



22 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

So rich a place, inhabited by so peaceful a population, 
is a temptation to robbers; and Toulouse, situated 
on the neck of land where Gaul is narrowest, is easy of 
access from the north, west, and east. So more than 
once the treasures of Toulouse were plundered, by 
the Romans, by the Cimbri, and might have been 
plundered yet more, had not men remarked that these 
ill-gotten gains finally enriched nobody, seemed to 
turn to faded leaves in the pocket like fairy-gold, 
while the robbers generally came to a miserable end. 
So that the words "Aurum Tolosanum" — the gold of 
Toulouse — became a proverb for unlawful wealth 
bringing a curse in its train. 

But the real gold of Toulouse was on its plains and 
slopes, ripening anew every harvest, and the farmers 
and the priests speedily grew wealthy again, as own- 
ing a commodity that every one desires. And the 
rich, helpless city made the best terms it could with 
dangerous neighbours, swiftly growing as quick to 
betray as it was accustomed to be plundered, well 
aware that its real life lay in no schemes of policy or 
deeds of heroism, but in the task of producing bread 
for all. 

Thus it existed for some hundreds of years, before 
and after Christ; and then, under the established 
rule of the Romans, happier days began. The Tou- 
louse of the third and fourth centuries of our era was 
a learned and pleasant city, famous for its Bar and its 
University; " Palladian Toulouse," Ausonius calls it, 
and so do several of his contemporaries. The great 
brick town, so populous that it had founded four 
cities with the overflow of its population — rose-red 
Toulouse, sheltered by its huge ramparts overlooking 
its orchards, and its cornfields — appeared definitively 



THE KINGDOM OF TOULOUSE 23 

seated in its peace and its prosperity when, with the 
very dawn of the fifth century, the Roman Empire 
crumbled and fell to bits. 

In 402 Alaric the Goth invaded Italy; in 406 the 
Vandals entered Gaul; in 417 the Goths, now allied 
with the Romans, chased the Vandals out of Spain 
and sent two captive Vandal kings to Rome in a tri- 
umph. Then, in exchange for Spain, the Goths were 
awarded Aquitaine, "The Pearl of Gaul," "The Queen 
of Provinces," with its towns of Bordeaux, Agen, 
Angouleme, Poitiers, and, finally, Toulouse, where the 
King of the Goths set up his court. 

There were Gauls in Toulouse who went out into 
exile rather than endure the yoke of the Barbarian; 
such was a certain Victorinus, the friend of Rutilius 
the poet, who left the land of his birth to live in Tus- 
cany; but there seems to have been no general revolt 
against the Goths. For one thing, they were brave 
soldiers, and the whole country round was infested 
by Germans: the Franks having settled in the north, 
the Burgunds in the west, and the Sarmates round 
Paris. Of all these the Goths were the most princely, 
courteous, and strong; they were Christians, and had 
assimilated a part of the Roman culture. 

It is difficult to assign an exact origin to any of 
these races of Barbarians who lived on the road, ate 
and slept on horseback, with their wives and all their 
wealth in their rude wagons, "trekking" from Finland 
to Constantinople and from the Vistula to Gaul; it 
is so easy to take a halting-place for a cradle. But 
it is probable that the Franks were Germans from the 
Rhine; the Goths, Germans from the banks of the 
Baltic, and probably of Scandinavian origin; while 
the Huns (we are just coming to the Huns) were of 



24 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

Finnish or Mongol origin — dreadful little men, like a 
bad dream, with their fat, fiat faces, pig eyes, rare 
beards, squat square shoulders and dwarfish statiure, 
"more like biped animals," says Jomandes, "than like 
men." The Goths, Barbarians though they were, 
seemed a protection against such as these. 

The Goths were more or less alive to the things of 
the spirit. In the fourth century their bishop, Wul- 
filas, combining the Greek and the Roman characters, 
had invented for them an alphabet: the Black Letter. 
King Eurik of Toulouse drew up the first German 
code of laws. They were a sort of link between the 
civilized world and the outer darkness of those cruel 
camps on the road. Better they than worse, at 
Toulouse! Such was probably the attitude of the dis- 
couraged country people. And, in fact (as we are told 
by Jomandes, the Goth), no sooner were they estab- 
lished by the banks of the Tarn than the Burgunds 
and Franks, "who infested the region most cruelly," 
retired each to his own place, while the Vandals and 
Alans crossed the mountains and returned to Spain. 

Sidonius ApoUinaris, the Roman Secretary of a 
Gothic King, has left us a description of the Barbarian 
court in Aquitaine, at that moment in residence at 
Bordeaux. But how different from the Bordeaux of 
Ausonius in the preceding century ! 

"I have been here nearly two months," he writes 
to a friend, "and have as yet obtained but one audience 
of the King. The master of the Palace has little leisure 
for me, for the whole world is here waiting on his 
pleasure, expectant of an answer. Here passes a 
blue-eyed Saxon, that no sea puts off his balance 
walking on the solid earth with a rolling sailor's gait. 
There, some old Sicamber, who has shaved his poll 



THE KINGDOM OF TOULOUSE 25 

in shame of some defeat, is now letting his locks grow 
anew. Look at yon sea-green Herule, the tint of his 
own Ocean! And see the Burgund, seven feet high, 
who bends the knee and implores peace. Here comes 
an Ostrogoth, the terror of the Huns, but humble 
enough before King Eurik. And thou, thyself, O 
Roman, thou comest also to the court of the Visigoth, 
suing for dear life! The strong arm of Eurik shall be 
thy buckler against the hordes of Scythia, and the 
Garonne, warlike and powerful, shall protect the 
enfeebled Tiber." 

Under the wise rule of these enlightened Barbarians, 
Toulouse became the centre of Occidental politics, a 
link between the Imperial Court and the half-savage 
Franks and Burgunds. Surrounded by the flower of 
Gallo-Roman culture, the King of the Goths was 
almost as refined and far more dignified than C^sar 
at Constantinople, and the Latin prose of King Eurik 
was praised at Rome for its purity and grace. 

The Goths reigned at Toulouse for ninety years, 
and held, towards the close of the fifth century, nearly 
all the country south of the Loire and west of the 
Rhone: all Provence and all Aquitaine. And then 
they passed. There is nothing to tell of the kingdom 
of Toulouse. These apt pupils founded nothing. All 
over France we come across memorials of the great 
Roman domination; and they exist no less in the 
souls and minds of the French: in their system of 
education, their municipalities, their law, even their 
religion — all these modem edifices are built up with 
Roman bricks. We cannot even imagine France 
without her Roman background. And the Goths in 
their glory and their bravery passed, and they would 
be as they had never been but for one great battle 



26 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

which they fought, side by side with the Romans, at 
Chalons, one of the few decisive battles of the world. 
The question whether barbarism or civilization should 
prevail in Western Europe was then decided. 

It was in 451. Attila and his heathen Huns were 
pouring into Gaul, burning and plundering the towns, 
desolating the marches of Lorraine and Champagne. 
We have no word for the horror inspired by the Huns. 
The usurpers in Gaul rose as one man against them 
— Romans, Goths, Burgunds, Franks. But there were 
still more Huns, for all the savage kingdoms conquered 
by Attila marched in his train. There were weeping 
and fear and lamentation in all the cities in Gaul, till 
a little Christian shepherdess from Nanterre, near 
Paris — a Gallo-Roman girl named Genovefa, inspired 
by that singular fusion of political sense with an ecstatic 
faith in the Unseen which more than once has illumi- 
nated the women of France at some great crisis in the 
national history — declared that Attila was doomed, that 
the Huns should not come near Paris. In superstitious 
Gaul her prophecy spread far and wide, heartening the 
distraught populations. And has not grateful Paris 
ever since named Genevieve its patron saint? But if 
Gaul owed much that day to the sanctity of the young 
shepherdess of the Seine, who awoke courage and hope 
in the hearts of the soldiers, Gaul owed even more to 
Theodoric the Goth, King of Toulouse, who lost his 
life on the fields of ChMons. 

He lost his life, but he won the battle! Attila was 
compelled to retire to his camp, mourning a hundred 
and sixty thousand men. Like a wounded lion (says 
the Gothic historian) he turned and held his enemy at 
bay, and then, gathering the mighty remnant of his 
forces around him, slowly he retreated into Italy. 



THE KINGDOM OF TOULOUSE 27 

Nor did the Huns again cross the frontiers of Gaul. 
And the Goths ruled at Toulouse for another fifty 
years, till they in their tiurn were defeated and routed 
by Clovis the Frank. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

JORNANDES: De Getarum Origine. 
Henry Bradley : The Goths. 
Victor Duruy: Histoire de France. 
PRivosT-PARADOL: Essai sur V Histoire universelle. 



CHAPTER V 

THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE 

Now let us cross the Loire and enter that northern 
half of Gaul so strangely different from the France 
of the South, For if Lyons, Vienne, Bordeaux, Tou- 
louse, and all the cities of Provence (and indeed right 
up to Poitiers, Tours, or even Orleans) appear easily 
recognizable — and in such detail that the very villages 
of our acquaintance bear as a rule in their names the 
trace of the Roman villa or vicus that they have super- 
seded — the whole North of France was still, at that 
date, enveloped in forests from which emerged rude 
military towns, as a rule forts or posting-stations. 
Treves in its Roman magnificence was a notable excep- 
tion: "The eye no longer has to pierce a network of 
branches to find the sky, obscured by a green mist; 
the air is clear again; the sunlight radiates in space; 
and at last I beheld an image of Bordeaux, its brilliant 
culture, its green vineyards and smiling villas." So 
Ausonius in his poem on the Moselle records his journey 
through the interminable northern forest. 

If towards the end of the fifth century we cross the 
Loire, on a mission, let us say, to Clovis, King of 
Tournai, the great man of that age, we find ourselves, 
between Orleans and Prankish Soissons, in a country 
still nominally Roman, the kingdom of Syagrius. 

28 



THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE 29 

But since the invasion of Attila all that region was 
in reality far more Christian than Roman. In most 
eyes, its chief city, Lutetia (the capital of the Parisii), 
was less remarkable as the residence <rf King Syagrius 
than as holding in its walls, like a relic, the holy Gene- 
vieve, whose prayers, in the estimation of all her 
Christian contemporaries, had preserved the kingdom 
of Paris, as Lutetia began to be called, from the abhorred 
inroad of the Huns. With Saint Marcel, Bishop of 
Paris, and Saint Remy, Bishop of Reims, Genevieve, 
far more than any Roman viceroy, was the respected 
leader of the people. 

And on the Belgian frontier Clovis, King of Toumai, 
considered these things in his heart. He was a German, 
or at least a Prankish, heathen, but his young wife, 
Clotilde, was of the Church of Christ. Clovis was a 
man of extraordinary acuteness, activity, and rest- 
lessness. He saw the growing importance of the 
Catholic Church, he remarked the ardent faith of that 
Gaul in which his German gods made of him and his 
chiefs mere strangers and usurpers — such as the Visi- 
goths had always remained in Aquitaine. For the Goths 
were Arians, and had never had the policy to see the 
widening gulf which their heretical opinions were opening 
between their ruling caste and the intolerant Catholics, 
their subjects. Doubtless Clovis said to himself that a 
great part might be played by a Catholic soldier of genius, 
and that the cross might make a splendid handle to a 
sword. And perhaps, as the legend avers, his wife had 
influence on him. Whether or no he thought, with 
Henri Quatre: ''Paris vaut Men une messe'' (and Tou- 
louse another), at all events, in 496, at the hands of Saint 
Remy, he was baptized at Reims, he and three thousand 
of his Prankish followers. 



30 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

Ten years before, in 486, at the age of one-and- 
twenty, Clovis had beaten the Roman Syagrius in 
battle, near Soissons, and had taken his kingdom from 
him. King Syagrius had fled to Toulouse, and was 
at first received with welcome, but when Clovis de- 
manded his victim the Gothic king dared not refuse 
so powerful a neighbour, and handed over his guest 
and ally, loaded with chains, to the tender mercies 
of the conqueror. This proof of the feebleness of the 
Gothic king encouraged the disaffection of the Catho- 
lics, for the hatred between religious parties was so 
great that it was almost impossible, in Gaul, for a 
sovereign to win the allegiance of subjects who re- 
garded him as a heretic. And, after the baptism of 
Reims, many of the clergy began to offer public 
prayers for the coming of Clovis, the champion of the 
Church. 

In 507 he came, accompanied by signs and wonders, 
by comets blazing in the sky, by mysterious messages 
from the saints; a white hart showed him a ford 
through the swollen waters of the Vienne in flood; 
and all these presages and miracles showed at least 
that the foreign king had been adopted by the very 
heart of superstitious Gaul. He advanced with un- 
exampled rapidity. At Vougle, near Poitiers, a great 
battle took place; the Visigoths were utterly defeated 
and their king was killed. In less than two years 
Clovis conquered almost all their Gaulish dominions, 
and added them to those kingdoms of Paris, of Reims, 
of Toumai, of Soissons, which he had already inherited 
or taken. They were now the kingdom of France. 

And of the Visigoths, after ninety years of possession, 
nothing was left, save one word: out of "Visigoth" 
(in the fiat, almost Spanish pronunciation of Aqui- 



THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE 31 

taine, "Bisigot") the people made Bigot. It was 
their revenge for the dominion of the heretic. 

Aquitaine had now acquired another foreign name: 
it was part of France. But the Franks, having con- 
quered, did not remain in possession like the Goths; 
they retreated north of the Loire. The Franks, 
though brave and powerful, were but a smallish tribe. 
It is improbable that their conquest greatly affected 
the racial composition of the peoples south of the 
Loire, which remained principally Celtic, with a strong 
infusion of Latin, both in Aquitaine and in the Provin- 
cial for the Romans during the half-dozen centuries 
of their dominion had loved these sunny and temperate 
regions of Gaul, had settled there abundantly and 
mingled their stronger strain with the supple native 
stock of the inhabitants. 

But Clovis came of another race — a Frank is a 
German and a forest-lover: the radiant space and sun- 
niness of these southern plains were profitable in his 
eyes as a conquest; but for a capital and a home, he 
preferred the North. Thus, at the moment when 
Gaul becomes France, Paris, not Lyons, or Aries, or 
Toulouse, or even Tours, becomes the capital. 

Paris had never been an important place under the 
Roman dominion: the actual diocese of Paris repre- 
sents pretty accurately the territory of the Parish 
(so true is it that the Church has preserved all sorts 
of vestiges of Rome like flies in amber), but their 
capital was contained in the two small islands of the 
Seine, gradually overflowing on to the left bank where 
the Palace of the Thermse (whose ruins still border the 
Boulevard St. Michel) stood among the vineyards. 
The Emperor Julian had liked Paris and had spent a 
winter there (it was, indeed, there that he was pro- 



32 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

claimed Augustus) ; "a small city, ' ' he says, * * nokixvr^,' ' 
but he admired the mild, equable climate and praised 
the thin wine of Suresnes. There was an amphitheatre 
there, of which something still remains, but compared 
with the cities of the South its monuments were of 
small account. Clovis and his wife, when they reigned 
there, founded a Christian church in honour of SS. 
Peter and Paul (on the site of the Pantheon), but their 
reign was short, and when it came to an end, in 511, 
Paris again slipped out of notice for several centuries. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 
Same as above. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FRENCH LANGUAGE 

When the Romans reigned in Gaiil, the conquered 
Celts forgot their native tongue, adopting the language 
of their masters, and by the end of the fourth century 
there was little trace remaining of the primitive Celtic 
speech. Its last, rare vestiges linger still in the names 
of places, always the words that change the least. 
Even to-day the suffix dun evokes a Celtic fortress (as 
in Verdun, Issoudun, Ch^teaudun), the prefix tre or 
tref recalls a long-perished hamlet; dieue and couse 
speak of the waters, nant of the dingle, Ian or lande 
of the field or God's acre. That is all. If we except 
the province of Brittany, whose Celtic speech was re- 
imported after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Celts 
the Romans knew have left no trace of their language 
in modern France. 

For the Celts of Gaul conversed in Latin, not in the 
Latin of the classics but in a living, popular Latin of 
their own. This rustic Roman tongue — this Roman, 
or Romance, as it came to be called in distinction from 
literary Latin — is still alive and easily recognizable 
(although much alloyed by constant additions from 
modern French) in the dialects and patois of the 
Centre and the South of France. The names of usual 
objects there have probably changed little since the 

3 33 



34 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

days of Diocletian. There still a cock is gall, a wild 
field comps, a cornfield jromentail, while aigo recalls 
aqua and neH, niveus; a bird is ussell, a cow bacco, 
a dog cone; when the shepherds pass the summer on 
the heights they are said to estivar, while hibernar is 
to spend the winter. The sights and sounds, the 
habits and necessities of daily life are still currently 
expressed in rustic Latin. 

For the Centre and South of France retained the 
impress of Rome until the beginning of the thirteenth 
century. But in the North the Romans receded early, 
giving place to the Franks. Early in the sixth century 
Brittany was reconquered by the Celts of England 
and thus lost, for full five hundred years, to Latin 
culture. And all along the Rhine German invasion 
and possession effaced the Latin tongue. Only in the 
region which lies between the Somme, the Meuse, and 
the Loire were the Frankish and the Latin languages 
beautifully interfused. This was the cradle of France. 
And when France began to speak, it spoke in French. 

The earliest French poem that we possess dates from 
the third quarter of the ninth century; the language is 
still all mixed with and steeped in Latin: 

Buona pulcella fut Eulalia, 
Bel avret corps, bellezour anima. . . . 
In figura de colomb volat a ciel. 
Tuit Oram que por nos degnet preier 
Quad avuisset de nos Christus mercit 
Post la mort, et a lui nos laist venir 
Par soun dementia ! 

(Bonne pucelle fut Eulalie, Elle avait un beau corps, una 
ame plus belle. . . . Elle vola au ciel en forme de colombe. 
Prions tous qu'elle dalgne interceder pour nous, Afin que 



THE FRENCH LANGUAGE 35 

le Christ ait pitie de nous Apr^s la mort et nous laisse 
venir k lui Par sa clemence.) 

Meanwhile the Church continued to use the right 
Latin of Rome, and often in old books we find the 
clerks calling the Latin of the people lingua laica, 
while the laymen name the Church-Latin derquois. 
During the course of the ninth century the two lan- 
guages became distinct; Latin was no longer under- 
standed of the people. The clergy were obliged to use 
the popular dialect for their catechisms and sermons, 
and, in fact, in the year 812 the Council of Tours 
ordered the priests of France to instruct their flock 
in "the rustic Roman tongue." Henceforth French 
is no mere patois, but a national speech with a literature 
of its own. 

This "rustic Roman tongue" was the language not 
only of the Gallo-Romans but of their conquerors. 
The Franks had vanquished Gaul, but may we not 
say that Gaul had vanquished the Franks, since they 
adopted both her religion and her language? Their 
native tongue ftimished the French with some few 
hundred words: first and foremost, terms of war, 
such as guerre itself, or werre, as it is written in old 
French, and guet, a watch; the names of weapons: 
targe, a small round shield or mark to fire at (our target) ; 
Mason, again a shield (though I believe it originally 
meant a trumpet, the word being connected with 
blare); haubert, a hauberk, or coat of ringed mail, 
shielding the neck (halsberg) ; heaume, a helmet ; 
eperon, a spur; Strier, sl looped rope for mounting into 
the saddle, a stirrup; then came the flags: gonfanon, 
hanniere; also words of wounding, such as hlesser, 
navrer. There are other terms which show the first 



36 THE ROMAN TRADITION 

conception of a new state of society: homrae-lige; 
vassal (originally a comrade — the Prankish ghesel being 
the same word as the German Gesell — but taken in the 
sense of a comrade bound to his free or liege lord) 
and valet, which is vassalet, i. e., the son of a vassal, 
taken into his lord's house to be bred as a page; echan- 
son, a cupbearer; seneschal, a steward, literally an 
old servant (sinsskalks), and marechal, a master of the 
horse, literally a horse-servant; echevin, a sheriff; 
echiguier, a treasury, an exchequer. Nearly all the 
names of furs are Prankish; many terms of dress or 
furniture, such as banc, Jauteuil (fald-stuhl) ; or of 
food, such as gateau, biere, bacon, rotir. The city 
takes its name from Rome, but the small town, the 
bourg, is Prankish, and the hamlet, Jiameau, and the 
hovel, borde. But chiefly the Prench language owes 
to the Prankish its terms of landscape, its words of 
country life: lande, moor; haie, hedge; gazon, turf; 
bois, wood; jachere, fallowland; gerbe, sheaf; if, yew; 
houx, holly; hetre, beech; roseau, reed; mousse, moss; 
all are of the Barbarians' bringing — and what a wood- 
land landscape they evoke! Nor was this all. The 
Pranks supplied the Gallo-Roman peoples with certain 
moral qualities whose names remain in the language: 
pride, orgueil; and frankness, franchise, that courage- 
ous sincerity which the conquerors of Gaul regarded as 
the characteristic of their race; and the adjectives 
gai, gaillard (hearty), jo/i, hardi, riche,frais, were surely 
worth having; and the verbs, if less charming, are no 
less eloquent of the manners of the conqueror; they 
are hair (to hate), honnir (to scoff at), epargner (to 
spare), effrayer (to affright; in its original signification, 
to break the peace), tricher (to cheat), garder (to keep), 
gagner (to gain), jangler (to speak ill). This mere list 



THE FRENCH LANGUAGE 37 

of words, with which I have perhaps fatigued my 
reader, will none the less, if he consider them, show him 
what qualities and conceptions the Prankish domina- 
tion brought to France, and prepare him to understand 
the new organization which began slowly to emerge 
from the chaos which ensued on the dissolution of 
the Roman Empire: the theme which we have next 
to consider, Feudal Society. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

D'Arbois de Jubainville: Les Premiers Habitants de V Europe. 
Gaston Paris: La Litterature frangaise au Moyen Age. 

La Poesie frangaise au Moyen Age. 
Chari.es Oulmont: La Poesie frangaise au Moyen Age. 
Ars^ne Darmesteter: La Vie des Mots. 



PART II 
FEUDAL SOCIETY 



39 



CHAPTER I 

THE RISE OF FEUDALISM 

The descendants of Clovis were not strong enough 
to keep in their hands the empire he had conquered. 
According to Barbarian custom, each brother in the 
royal family inherited an equal share of his father's 
kingdom, taking not one great region, east, north, 
south, or west, but (much as to-day, when the property 
of some peasant farmer is divided, and each child 
claims his narrow strip of woodland on the northern 
slope, his rood or two of meadow down by the river, 
and his strip of vineyard lying to the south, so that 
he may possess a reduced image of the paternal farm) 
they separated the kingdom into a quantity of por- 
tions, equal in value, and then drew lots for them. So 
it happened that one would possess Aries, Bordeaux, 
Melun, Tours, Marseilles, and Avranches, while his 
brother was lord of Soissons, Rouen, Nantes, Cahors, 
etc., leaving to a third Avignon, Verdun, Clermont- 
Ferrand, Laon, and Reims, while Paris was divided 
into three lots, and, under the sway of its bishop, 
remained practically a neutral town. So capricious 
an arrangement precluded any feeling of loyalty on 
the one hand, of protective sovereignty on the other, 
between the king and his people. The anarchy in 
Gaul was complete. But in this absence of any cen- 

41 



42 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

tralized authority there were two forces which grew 
and increased in strength: the independent munici- 
paHties and the Church. 

The Barbarian sovereignty affected but little the 
regions south of the Loire, where the Roman manners 
and customs still reigned, almost undisturbed, save 
when some invading force ravaged all on its passage; 
but in the North and East where the Prankish popu- 
lation swelled its train with hordes of half-savage 
pagans from beyond the Rhine, the centre of society 
changed: the towns became less important and the 
country more. Here the language and the manners 
of the population were oddly mingled. From the 
Seine to the Somme the Gallo-Romans were still more 
numerous than the Franks, and the Latin language 
held its own; but from the Somme to the Rhine the 
Barbarians were no longer, as in the kingdom of Paris, 
mere colonies or bands of idle warriors, leading the 
lusty life of peace in their country houses, hunting 
and carousing between two campaigns; in the north- 
east of France they had settled in tribes, bringing with 
them their farmers and labourers ; and here the natives 
of Gaul were the minority, while the peasants and 
warriors of Prankish origin formed the bulk of the 
population. The privileges of these latter were great; 
according to the Wehr-geld of the Prankish conquerors, 
the fines paid for murder or hurt to the victim or his 
heirs were always twice as great in the case of a Bar- 
barian being assaulted as in the event of a native's 
injury; while all men of Prankish race were exempt 
from the taxes on the land, which were still, though 
very irregularly, collected according to the system 
which the Romans had instituted. The Gallo-Roman 
landlords paid for all ; and were mulcted in their crops, 



THE RISE OF FEUDALISM 43 

their cattle, their woods, their vines, besides paying 
a heavy house-tax. That principle of privilege and 
exemption of one class at the expense of another, 
which the French Revolution should finally uproot, 
flourished exceedingly in the France of the Franks. 

The towns of Frankish Gaul were governed, as in 
the time of the Romans, by an assembly of citizens 
(called the Curie), by a bench of magistrates, and a 
Defensor, or Lord Protector, which office, in later times, 
was generally assumed by the bishop. At least, that 
is how the town was governed, and generally very 
well governed as a town, as an independent organism; 
but it was attached to the central power by a supreme 
official, a sort of prefect, caUed a Graf or count, a 
functionary destined to receive the dues and dispense 
the authority of the king. 

Except this functionary, when in pursuit of his 
duties, the nobles of that time, whether of Frankish 
or Gallo-Roman strain, no longer frequented the towns ; 
the King of Neustria (north-western France), to take 
an instance, resided not in Paris, but in some great 
hunting-lodge or farm, either at Braine, near Soissons, 
or at Chelles-sur-Marne, or on some other of his rural 
estates. And the counts and margraves of his follow- 
ing, when they did not gather round him in their 
bands and coteries (for the form of society that was to 
culminate in Versailles springs from a very ancient 
stock in France), were hunting, or harvesting, or 
harrying their serfs on their own properties. These 
noble or even royal habitations had nothing of the 
military aspect of the towns, whose walls and towers 
were already quite mediaeval; they were just hand- 
some and spacious wooden buildings, surrounded by 
large pillared verandas or piazzas, modified from the 



44 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

Roman peristyle, whose columns were often very 
ingeniously carved and polished — 

Singula silva favens aedificavit opus, 
Altior innititiu", quadrataque porticus ambit, 
Et sculpturata lusit in arte faber, 

says Fortunatus, the Latin poet, who was the guest of 
the Prankish king at Braine. 

These counts and margraves who gathered to the 
court — the antrustions, the great Prankish chiefs who 
lived in the truste (or fealty) of a king — were less his 
subjects, than his confederates; upon notice given, 
and for cause esteemed sufficient by their peers, 
they might transfer their allegiance to another over- 
lord and yet retain their estates in the dominions of 
their ex-sovereign. Now, a king's real wealth was not 
his possessions, but the forces that he could muster 
on the day of battle; so that he was in fact more de- 
pendent on his nobles than they on him, and perpe- 
tually anxious to find a counterpoise to their power. 
The rise of Gallo-Roman ministers, often bom in serf- 
dom, the royal favour so frequently bestowed on the 
great Gallo-Roman families, were expedients of the 
Prankish kings to balance the preponderance of their 
antrustions. 

The struggle was no longer between Roman and 
Barbarian, between victor and vanquished, but be- 
tween the great military nobility on the one hand and 
the king and his ministers on the other. The feeble- 
ness of the Merovingian kings rendered the effort too 
unequal. In the middle of the eighth century the 
last descendant of Clovis was dethroned by his nobles, 
and sent, against his will, to end his days in a monas- 



THE RISE OF FEUDALISM 45 

tery; one of their own order was set upon the throne, 
the Pope himself pronouncing in favour of the usurper, 
saying it was meet that the title and the reality of 
power should go together. The name of this usurper, 
the candidate of the nobles, was Pepin le Bref. He 
was crowned by St. Boniface, and was succeeded by 
his son. That son was Charlemagne. 

Charlemagne reigned four-and-forty years, and left 
a name as great as Alexander's. 

Merveillus hum est Charles! 
II cunquist Rome, Puille et tute Calabre, 
Constantinoble et Saissoigne la large, 
Vers Engleterre passat-il la mer salse! 

Here the poet exaggerates; the conqueror of Rome, 
Italy, Constantinople, Saxony, did not invade our 
islands; but by the end of the eighth century the 
Prankish king had overcome Europe from Spain to 
Hungary, from the Mediterranean to the shores of the 
Baltic and the Northern Sea. The kingdom of the 
Franks measured a thousand miles from north to south, 
as much from east to west: it was no longer a king- 
dom but an empire. One Christmas Day in Rome^ 
it was in the year 800 — the Pope, Leo III, placed on 
Charlemagne's brow the crown of the Emperors of the 
West, and all Rome shouted: "Hail the August! 
Long life and victory to the Roman Emperor!" The 
echo of that cry rang through Italy to France, Ger- 
many, Northern Spain, all at last again united in a 
Pax Romana. 

Charlemagne had conquered Europe. More than 
that: he organized and administered his vast posses- 
sions. This great captain, who could read but little 



46 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

— who, despite his efforts, cotdd never learn to write — 
was one of those master-minds who every thousand 
years, astonish humanity, Like that other soldier of 
France who, exactly a thousand years later (for 800- 
814 match with 1800-18 14) was to conquer the world 
again and to renew its law, Charlemagne established 
his order wherever his armies pitched their camps. 
He drew up a code of customs, founded schools (him- 
self attending their classes, learning at fifty Greek and 
Latin), he made an immense and glorious effort to 
pull the car of empire out of its Barbarian rut and 
set it roUing down the roads of Rome. But, like 
Napoleon, Charlemagne failed. He had amassed too 
much; he had no fit successor. His son, Louis the 
Debonnair, was a feeble, faltering soul. His three 
grandsons cast lots for his vesture, and between them 
dislocated the Empire. The eldest, Charles the 
Bald, took France; Louis appropriated Germany. The 
weakest, Lothair, was given Italy; and, to make his 
share less conspicuously small, was accorded the title 
of Emperor, with a long strip of territory torn from 
the living side of France — from the Meuse to the 
Rhine, from the Rhdne to the Alps — which was named 
Lothair's Land, Lotharingen, or, as we say, Lorraine. 
But no act of empire could infuse a soul into the bleed- 
ing remnant snatched from the flanks of Gaul. The 
rib was a rib, not Eve. Lorraine continued French 
in feeling and tradition. Many of the wars of Europe 
have sprung from this iniquity, perpetrated at Verdun 
in 843. A hundred years after the Treaty of Verdun, 
Lothair's Land had disappeared; half, the duchy of 
Lorraine, had been annexed to Germany, the other 
half englobed in Italy. Charlemagne's inheritance 
was divided against itself. Otho the Great, wearing 



THE RISE OF FEUDALISM 47 

at once the crowns of Italy and Germany, restored 
the Roman claims under the style of "the Holy Roman 
Empire of Germanic Nationality," and France found 
in front of her the rival and enemy with whom, through- 
out the centuries, she should dispute the sway of 
Europe. 

Out of the four elements which we have passed in 
review — out of the old Celtic foundation, the Roman 
culture, the Christian Church, and the Prankish 
conquest — at last a new society issued: Feudal Soci- 
ety. Until the middle of the eighth century, when 
Charlemagne revived for a moment the Empire of 
the West, there had been no society in Gaul since the 
fall of the Roman Empire, merely a chaos of ill- 
assorted atoms. At last these atoms were organized 
and came to life. But not on the grand scale of which 
Clovis and Charlemagne had dreamed. However 
great a man may be, he cannot invent a form of society 
— at least not one that will long survive the living 
impression of his will and personality. A form of 
society must organize itself out of its own elements. 
And indeed, after the death of Charlemagne, society 
appeared more than ever to be falling to pieces. The 
princes again split up their empire to suit their indi- 
vidual tastes; they had never appeared more egotistic, 
more remote from their subjects; royalty had never 
seemed more utterly divorced from power, justice, or 
assistance. 

Towards the middle of the ninth century, those 
dukes and counts who had originally been functionaries 
of the Roman Empire, who in later days had been the 
administrators of the Barbarian Kings, took on a new 
importance, and in the increasing weakness of any 



48 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

central government became owners and substantial 
powers. One after another, they affirmed as their 
own, and as transmissible by heredity to their child- 
ren, an authority which they had originally exercised 
merely as officials and delegates. Each duke and 
count became a law unto himself, led his subjects into 
battle, exacted from them their toll of taxes, ad- 
ministered justice, entailed his estates. There was no 
longer any centre, any whole, any organization in 
Gaul, only a lively disintegration of parts. 

The Roman Empire, which Charlemagne had vainly 
attempted to revive, was truly dead and buried. But 
something stirred in the grave; the dust began to 
heave and breathe. It was a very low form of life; 
but at least it was life. Life ever renews itself at first 
in lowly forms. This new attempt at an organism and 
an order began its long progress towards those heights 
from which the Roman Empire had fallen in ruins. 

Let us imagine for a moment the condition of one 
of those country districts in which some Gallo-Roman 
count or duke, some Prankish noble or Danish pirate, 
established himself lord and master. No road is sure; 
battle and murder are constant ; the king is so remote 
that few in the countryside even know his name. 
Then comes our captain, fiercer and stronger than any 
of his neighbours, showing his teeth Hke an angry 
mastiff at any menace of aggression. His wooden 
fortress stands proudly on its rock, commanding all 
the country round; behind his planks and palisades 
he reigns, he rules, far more surely than the king in 
Paris. And the farmers unite to proclaim him their 
chief, saying: "Protect me from mine enemies and 
I will be thy man!" 

Often this captain is already the chief of a band: 



THE RISE OF FEUDALISM 49 

we know how the Prankish nobles lived in troops and 
companies. Now that he has established himself on 
the footing of a petty sovereign, he will divide his 
lands with his companions. They will be his vassals 
(we know that vassal is the same word as Gesell, com- 
rade, the letters g and v being interchangeable), they 
will be his captains and his magistrates and do him 
homage for their estates. Be sure he will keep for 
himself the choicer morsels; the slopes that suit the 
vine, the rocks on which a fort may stand, the great 
stretches of forest, the ports on sea or lake or river 
(indeed, woods and waters belonged by right, in feudal 
law, to the lord of the land), but yet he will find it 
to his interest to surround himself with powerful 
nobles who can aid him in the hour of need. 

They, in their turn, will divide their territories into 
smaller fiefs: some of them, like their own, are terres 
nobles, entailing only military service; some of them 
are ploughlands, or terres roturieres (that puzzling 
word in modem French, roturier, a commoner, comes 
from ruptura, the opening of the furrow), and these 
last are paid for in rent or in labour — more often, in 
those days of scanty coin, in work; the peasant hold- 
ing his plot in exchange for so many days' corvee, or 
forced labour, on his landlord's grounds, or on condi- 
tion of supplying certain redevances, such as wood, 
com, wine, poultry, butter, etc., for the lord's con- 
sumption. This corvee, these redevances (which were 
gradually to degenerate into fearful abuses — which 
were, indeed, largely to provoke the French Revolu- 
tion), were, at their origin, merely commodious forms 
of rent. Of the greater part of the tenants on such 
an estate it may be said that they lived like freedmen 
and they died like slaves. There were serfs, of course, 



50 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

who were really slaves, or little better; they belonged 
to their masters, body and goods and gear. "Li uns 
des sers," says Beaumanoir (and he lived in the thir- 
teenth century, in the time of St. Louis!) — "Li uns 
des sers sunt si souget a lor seignor que lor sires por 
prendre quanques que il ont, a mort et a vie, et les 
cors tenir en prison, toutes les fois qu'il lor plest, soit 
a tort, soit a droit qu'il n'en est tenus a respondre 
fors a Dieu." 

The lord might beat, imprison, chastise, taunt them 
at his will; it was a mere chance if he was generous. 
But what the serfs complained of most was the uncer- 
tainty of their service : their innumerable corvees might 
be exacted of them at any moment: "ne savent le 
vdpre de quoi 'A serviront le matin; il n'y a nul cer- 
tainete de servises." 

But the greater part of the tenants were not, strictly 
speaking, serfs; they were mainmortables , holding their 
little farms in mortmain, or, as we should say, on a 
life-interest. And these are the men of whom I have 
said that they lived like freedmen and died like slaves. 
For, save that they might not marry a woman belong- 
ing to another estate except at the cost of a heavy fine 
(and even then the children were divided between the 
two landlords), their lot was tolerable; so long as they 
lived, their lord could ask them nothing beyond their 
rents and redevances ("li seignor ne leur pueent riens 
demander, se il ne meffont, fors lor cens et lor rentes 
et lor redevances"). But on their death-bed the 
scene changes. For the essential characteristic of 
mortmain is that the lord is the heir of his serf: the 
estate has been lent to the serf and can never be alien- 
ated. " Et s'il muert, il n'a nul hoir fors que son 
seignor, ni li enfant du serf n'i ont riens." ("And, if 



THE RISE OF FEUDALISM 51 

he die, he has no heir save only his lord, nor shall the 
child of the serf inherit aught.") Their possession 
died with them, and (though, as the centuries ran on, 
the right of mortmain was frequently commuted into 
a heavy death-due) this strange tenure of property 
flourished in certain parts of France until the outbreak 
of the Revolution. 

Besides the right of mortmain, the feudal lord pos- 
sessed innumerable seignorial rights: the toll on every 
bridge, the tax on every mill, on every parish oven; 
the rights of hebergement, which meant that your house 
was your lord's to come and lodge in at his will; the 
right of pourvoirie, which signifies that he could re- 
quisition your horse and your ass, your carriage and 
your cart, at his own sweet will, for any expedition of 
war or peace. Should a stranger settle on the land 
for more than a year and a day, he lost his liberty, 
became a serf and subject to all these conditions; un- 
less, indeed, the lord had invited him to come to his 
estate, in which case very favourable conditions \v?-ere 
granted him and he was said to hold his farm in hostise. 
These hospites were the equivalent of the burghers in 
the towns. 

Above the rank of serf and the condition of mort- 
main were the vilains or free peasants, rare in the early 
centuries of feudalism, but increasing as the relative 
security, which the Feudal System brought with it, 
allowed the idea of individual liberty to arise; until, 
so early as the age of St. Louis, the land was chiefly 
worked by these free farmers. They possessed the 
entire disposal of their goods, the right of bequest, 
but for all the rest were subject to the same corvees, 
redevances, and services as their neighbours who held 
their land in mortmain — indeed often, as the wise Beau- 



52 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

manoir observes, their condition was harder, for the lord 
naturally favoured and strove to enrich the farmer who 
was nursing up for him a comfortable heritage. 

The crops and trees that flourished on these rural 
estates, where the peasants dwelt in their chimneyless 
thatched hovels, were far less numerous than those 
we see to-day. Neither plane nor elm nor mulberry, 
neither maize nor buckwheat, neither hops nor arti- 
chokes nor beetroot nor tobacco nor potatoes. There 
were, of course, apples; but the fabrication of cider 
appears to have been unknown in France before the 
twelfth century. 

The condition of these labouring people was hard; 
but, after all, infinitely less hard than it had been be- 
fore the establishment of feudal law and feudal force 
had given every hamlet and every hovel — sometimes, 
no doubt, a tyrant, but at least always a protector. 
Then, as now, the saving peasant throve. Then, as 
now, some frugal shepherd would lay by a penny here, 
a farthing there, till, with his trifling profits, he could 
rent or buy a plot of land, a cabin, and a bam. There 
were always needy nobles, impoverished by warfare 
or mismanagement, glad to sell. There were always 
thrifty farmers, able to buy. At every point of the 
history of France men have been able through their 
effort and their economy to pass from class to class. 
This is what the peasant-serfs forgot when they sang 
(as in Robert Wace's Roman de Rou) : 

Pourquoi nous laisser faire dommage? 
Nous sommes hommes comme ils sent; 
Des membres avons comme ils ont, 
Et tout autant grands coeurs avons, 
Et tout autant souffrir pouvons. 



THE RISE OF FEUDALISM 53 

(Why should we let them do us wrong? 
Are we not men, as they are men? 
Just the same limbs as theirs, I ken. 
As big a heart within our breast, 
And just as easily oppressed.) 



The people were at last to find an ally against the 
nobles: the king. But not until the feudal lords had 
utterly crushed the feeble descendants of Charlemagne. 
These miserable monarchs were but baubles that the 
turbulent peers of France used to play with till they 
broke. They were of infinitely less consequence than 
a Duke of Aquitaine or a Count of Flanders. The 
race of Pepin le Bref had come to the throne of France 
by an act of aggression and a usurper was to snatch 
its borrowed crown away. On the death of Louis V 
in 987 the peers of France, assembled at Senlis, pre- 
ferred to the rightful heir, the dead King's brother, 
one of their own order, Hugues Capet, Duke of France 
and Count of Paris. Hugues Capet had no shadow 
of a legal claim, no vestige of feudal right; but he 
was a man of parts, brother of the Duke of Burgundy, 
brother-in-law of the Norman Duke. He came of a 
line of great captains, of whom more than one had 
seized a crown. And he was the first of a great line 
of monarchs who, little by little, were to triumph over 
those unruly feudal tributaries from whom he sprang 
and who had raised him to the throne. Over and 
over again in the history of France we shall find the 
Capetian kings the fosterers of popular liberty. 

There is another sign of the future in that assembly 
of the peers at Senlis, in which we may read the first 
stirrings of a new sense that also was to make for the 
destruction of feudalism. The rightful heir, Charles 



54 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

of Lorraine, was a vassal of t-he Holy Roman Empire. 
Hugues Capet was the Duke of France. And, in 
preferring a usurper to a foreigner, the nobles of 
France showed that already, dimly and uncertainly 
but yet instinctively, they knew themselves the leaders 
of a nation and descried the rights of a race. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Victor Duruy : Histoire de France. 

AuGUSTiN Thierry : Lettres sur I'Histoire de France. 

Recits Merovingiens. 
Leopold Delisle: La Classe agricole au Moyen Age, etc, 
Dareste: Les Classes agricolcs en France, etc. 
Beaumanoir: Les Coutumes du Beauvoisis. 
L60N Gautier: La Chevalerie. 
Jacques Bainville: Histoire de Deux Peuples. 



^^' 



CHAPTER II 

CHIVALRY 

I HAVE said that feudalism was a low form of life be- 
cause it was not a state of freedom, for there can be 
no liberty when a man's well-being and even his exist- 
ence are guaranteed by no general law or public pro- 
tection, but depend on the violence or amenity of a 
powerful neighbour. There was in the tenth century 
no central government dispensing safety to all, but 
everywhere the disordered combat of individual forces, 
leaders, and bands of soldiers and strong individuals 
snatching as best they might the fragments of a shat- 
tered authority. Out of this welter of anarchy and 
barbarism, feudalism emerged as a desperate attempt 
at a real government, a hierarchy and an order. The 
great feudal nobles admitted at least each other's 
rights, and composed, not an organized society but 
at least a voluntary confederation; they recognized, 
though loosely enough, certain duties towards each 
other, certain privileges, the same for all. A certaia 
number of men, a confederation of petty despots, 
under the name of lords and vassals, were solidly 
established on their own estates, the humbler owing 
allegiance to the stronger, the greater owing protec- 
tion to the less, and all of them invested on their own 
domains, in relation to their own subjects, with an 

55 



56 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

arbitrary and absolute power. When the weak can 
only find protection and security in the service of the 
strong, there can be no freedom; even the lord is a 
vassal of his overlord, and subject not to the law of 
the general good but to the caprice of a sovereign. 
These great lords, protectors of the people, were always 
ready to wage war against each other; specialized for 
battle and plunder and rapine, they had no other 
interest in life. Each stood on his own dunghill, 
crowing his victory. It seemed as if society, at last 
reconstituted, would remain void of true civilization, 
full of honour and courage, no doubt, but also of 
ignorance and brutality. 

Fortunately, in face of these feudal barons, the 
Church existed! And the Church was mindful of the 
poor. In the last years of the tenth century she ob- 
tained from the military nobles the constitution of a 
"Truce of God." The Treve de Dieu was a close time 
for battles. There were certain days and seasons 
when the sword must perforce remain in the scabbard ; 
the Catholic might wage no war between Advent and 
Epiphany, neither from Quinquagesima Sunday until 
Whitsuntide; nor again during the month of May, 
the blessed month of Mary (and this is perhaps one 
reason why the mediaeval poets found the month of 
May so fair) , nor on feast-days ; nor in any week might 
they declare war between Wednesday evening and 
Monday morning. 

This was the Truce; there was also the Peace of 
God. Perpetual peace must reign in churches and 
churchyards, on village streets, in mill-yards, and on 
the king's highway. In places where this peace had 
been violated the bells might no longer ring nor the 
Mass be said. And the knight who had broken the 



CHIVALRY 57 

peace was deprived of his alleu (the hereditary estate 
which he might bequeath to his heirs) and also of his 
fief, the feudal lands which he held from his overlord. 
Thus reduced in time and place, war ran between its 
banks like an angry river, bordered by scenes of quiet 
and security. 

The Church had done much for the defenceless: 
priests, pilgrims, monks and nuns, children, labouring 
people, were no longer exposed to imending ravage. 
The serf was safe who laid his hands on the stilt 
of his plough — the plough, like the altar, was a sanc- 
tuary. And the Chiirch did more than this. By the 
institution of Chivalry, a new soul was breathed into 
the still barbaric body of feudal society. 

The origin of this new order, which, all over Europe, 
appeared to spring spontaneously into life during the 
eleventh century, was the application of the Christian 
spirit to certain antique usages and customs brought 
into France by the Franks and the Burgunds, and 
evidently of Germanic source. The solemn investi- 
ture of the young soldier with his arms, his sacred 
undertaking to accomplish certain feats, the oath of 
fealty and homage, the vow to respect women and the 
weak, these are maxims which exist, more or less, in 
the oldest runes of Scandinavia; they are but the stuff 
which Christianity was to fashion into the mystical 
vesture of the knight. 

By the dawn of the twelfth century the code of 
chivalry was complete; the first duty of the perfect 
knight was to believe: he must be "all iron without 
and all faith within"; he must respect the weak and 
take up, if needs be, their defence in arms; he must 
love his native country even to the death; he must 
never flinch before a foe; he must always be ready 



58 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

to wage war upon the infidel; he must be faithful 
to his lord and exact in all his feudal obligations; he 
must be, not self-seeking, but liberal and generous to 
all; above all, he must never lie; his word must be 
his bond; he must be everywhere the champion of 
right and justice. . . . 

In fact, we inherit from chivalry our ideal of a 
gentleman. 

Special stress was laid on a true knight's defence 
of the defenceless. Circumstances have forced me 
to read some score of interminable mediaeval poems 
of chivalry. This commandment lies at the root of 
them all: The knight shall never seek his advantage 
at the expense of the weak. And we remember how 
St. Louis, King of France, when shipwrecked off the 
coast of Cyprus in 1254, refused to let himself be 
saved, with the Queen and their children, in a small 
galley which the sailors brought from shore for them: 
"Sirs," said that very perfect knight, "there are on 
this vessel some five hundred persons whose life is as 
dear to them as mine is to me. You have no room 
for them. They will be left stranded off the coast 
of Cyprus. I would rather share their danger with 
the Queen and my children than be saved apart!" 
And the King continued his voyage on the starting, 
groaning ship, which reached in safety, though slowly, 
the shores of France. 

The code of chivalry was completed by an ingenious 
system of education, thanks to which the children 
of every feudal rank were bred in the traditions and 
raised to the standard of the class immediately above 
them. At seven years old they were sent to the house 
or castle of their father's overlord, where, in return 
for their breeding, they performed certain services of 



CHIVALRY 59 

domesticity, pages and varlets (valet means vassalet), 
however lofty were their birth. Towards twelve years 
of age the little lad learned to ride, and to furbish and 
use his arms. It was now his privilege to follow his 
lord on his adventures, solid on his horse, carrying a 
shield and a lance. He was the ecuyer — the shield- 
bearer, the squire. But in time of peace the stables 
were his quarters and your young baron was little 
better than a groom. A few years later, between 
sixteen and twenty, the squire was made a knight and 
put on, for the sacred fast and vigil of his arms, the 
white tunic, sign of purity; the red robe which sym- 
bolizes the blood that he must shed; and the black 
jerkin that betokens death, the close companion of 
the knight-at-arms. 

SOURCES CONSULTED : 
Same as preceding chapter. 



CHAPTER III 

THE COMMUNES OR TOWNS' UNIONS : RISE 
OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS 

While the feudal nobles reigned uncontested over the 
woods and fields of France, the old municipal Roman 
spirit still lingered and strengthened in the towns. 
The words curie, decurion, were forgotten, but the 
magistrature and the town council which they de- 
signated were still full of life. The Consuls, in the 
South, the Jurats or Echevins (Sheriffs) in the North, 
still ruled the city, subject to many quarrels with 
the bishop or the count. At Auxerre the count de- 
clared for the burghers against the bishop; at Amiens 
the bishop supported them against the count. If, 
south of the Loire, where Roman law and Roman 
customs still prevailed, the cities easily attained their 
independence, because from time immemorial the 
bishop there had been their chief magistrate: a De- 
fensor rather than a baron — if Toulouse, for instance, 
counted kings not among her overlords but in the list 
of her allies — it was far different in the North. There 
the arrogant spirit of feudalism had penetrated even 
the Church, and in the towns within the influence of 
the Rhine or the Meuse the bishops in their pulpits 
called the burghers of great cities by the name of" serfs. " 
And in all the cities round the Somme and the,Aisne, 

60 



THE COMMUNES OR TOWNS' UNIONS 6i 

throughout the ancient stronghold of the Franks, the 
struggle was stiff and strong, and never really ceased 
until, in the fifteenth century, the monarchy, at last 
consistently organized, was strong enough to engulf 
and assimilate all that was left of feudalism and 
commune alike. 

In the third quarter of the eleventh century the 
movement began, doubtless by a reaction against the 
abuse of feudalism, and with an impulse as universal 
and as spontaneous as that which had produced the 
birth of chivalry. Le Mans led the way in 1 066 — an 
easy date for us to remember, since it is the year of 
the Battle of Hastings — and Cambrai followed suit 
ten years later; soon all the North was on fire with 
civic enthusiasm. Noyon, Beauvais, Laon, Saint- 
Quentin, Amiens, Soissons, Sens, Reims, all snatched 
from their overlords their rights and their charters 
— snatched them with effusion of blood and arms in 
hand. The citizens met in their churches and market- 
places, declared themselves associated in a free "com- 
munion" or commune, swore to maintain each other 
in their common rights, to submit to no oppression, 
and to endure from no overlord the title or the treat- 
ment of serfs. "Commune," says Guibert de Nogent, 
who wrote in the twelfth century — "Commune is a new 
and odious expression, which signifies that burghers, 
liable to be taxed at their lord's pleasure {taillahle 
cL merci), will henceforth pay him once a year the sum 
they have agreed on, and no more. And for any 
crimes they may commit they can be fined only accord- 
ing to an established rate." 

The liberty which these burghers of the eleventh 
century fought and died to defend was but a parti- 
cular and a material freedom: the right to come and 



62 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

go at will, the right to buy and sell, to leave their 
fortune to the heirs of their body, undisputed by an 
overlord, the right to fight their own battles and 
maintain their own order. It was independence that 
they sought rather than political freedom. They 
were purely local. And France was covered, from the 
Somme to the South, with a sprinkling of small repub- 
lics, free indeed but most divisible — indeed, with no 
central interest at all to bind them. It was a progress 
towards Freedom; the seed of Liberty; but from the 
standpoint of Unity, it was something of a falling-off. 

The centre of town life was the belfry, the visible 
sign of the commune, which was removed when the 
commune was suppressed. Its great bell was the 
voice of public duty; the announcement of fire, or 
of the approach of the town's enemies, or sedition; 
and at that clang the burghers of the town would 
assemble, each bearing his weapons. They assembled 
often. The establishment of the communes was the 
first step to freedom, but it did not make for peace. 
And, indeed, sometimes, in reading these records of 
endless strife and bloodshed, we appreciate the saying 
of that old clerk who wrote that there were in the 
world four sorts of wranglers whose tumult cannot be 
surpassed: a herd of snorting swine, a roomful of 
angry women, a chapter of canons, and a commune 
of domineering rustics, communia rusticorum domi- 
nantium. The strife between the bishops and the 
mayors was incessant, at least in the North of France. 
Veritable battles raged between the municipal and the 
ecclesiastical forces — ^battles in which the bishop 
possessed a formidable arm. For the prelates of the 
Church ruled with a double title, not only as feudal 
lords but as guardians of the patrimony of St. Peter, 



THE COMMUNES OR'TOWNS' UNIONS 63 

holding property in trust for a great spiritual corpora- 
tion. In 1235 the Archbishop of Reims excommuni- 
cated the burghers of that commune, damning them 
with the anathema of a perpetual malediction: 

"May they be accursed in the city and accursed 
in the country! 

"Their goods accursed and their bodies accursed! 

"May they perish to all eternity! 

' ' May no Christian greet them ! 

' ' May no priest say Mass for them ! 

"May they be buried in the grave of the ass and 
scattered like dung on the face of the fields!" 

This appalling sentence was read in all the churches 
of the diocese. Nor was this all. The doom was 
pronounced contagious : 

"Whosoever shall have eaten, drunk, spoken, or 
prayed with one of these shall be excommunicate, 
even as they." 

The burghers of Reims had no weapon in their 
armoury which could oppose such an onslaught. They 
took their grievance to St. Louis, who, while securing 
the Archbishop's authority and upholding his rights, 
obtained from the fiery prelate a written, signed, and 
sealed engagement that he would treat the burghers 
with humanity — a document which the King gave 
into the keeping of the sheriffs of Reims — and had 
the anathema removed. 

The Church always showed herself extremely hostile 
to the creation of communes — at least in the North of 
France. In 1235 the Synod of Paris denounced the 
' ' synagogues (that is to say, associations) which usurers 
and extortioners have constituted in nearly all the 
cities, towns, and villages of France, which synagogues 
are vulgarly called communes, and have established 



64 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

diabolical usages, contrary to the organization of the 
Church and tending to the upheaval of her jurisdiction." 
The Church, even more than feudal lords or jealous 
king, was the stumbling-block in the path of the 
communes. If their rise had been rapid, from 1066 
to the end of the following century, thenceforward 
their decline was as swift. By the end of the thir- 
teenth century their condition was almost hopeless. 
Civic freedom failed. Not only the struggle against 
Church and feudality and king, but administrative 
cares, financial difficulties, the public bankruptcy of 
town after town, destroyed the life of the communes. 
These little federative republics, with their spirit of 
sturdy independence, their courage, their enterprise, 
were doomed to death ; but they had lived long enough 
to nourish in their walls and under the shadow of their 
belfries the heirs of all their dreams: those "deputSs 
des bonnes villes," those solid burghers — Third Order 
of the nation, henceforth assigned as coadjutors to 
the nobles and the clergy — who, from 1302 onwards, 
should take their part in the deliberations of the States- 
General, under a title, obscure at first and modest, 
but destined to renown: the Tiers-Etat. The com- 
munes had not lived in vain. They perished, as 
separate entities, only when the citizens of France 
were reckoned with and represented in the government 
of the country. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 
Same as before. 
Luchaire: Les Communes frangaises. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FIRST RENAISSANCE 

Poetry awoke in France towards the close of the 
eleventh century. There had indeed been poems 
before, but scarcely poetry. Indeed, the earliest 
poems in France strike us as singularly unpoetical. 
Even the Life of Saint Alexis, so moving in its con- 
ception (for Saint Alexis, like Gautama, is a young 
prince who escapes from his palace and the arms of 
his bride to lead the ascetic life) — even this touching 
story is presented without simplicity or grace. Rheto- 
ric and declamation, those bad fairies of French art, 
were apparently present at its cradle. 

But towards 1080 — some fifteen years after the 
Battle of Hastings — there arose a great poet in the 
land of France. We do not know his name. He 
was probably (at least this is M. Bedier's theory) one 
of those wandering minstrels who on fair-days and 
feast-days used to chant long poems of romance and 
adventure to the crowds assembled in the market- 
place, as even to this day they do in the small country 
towns of Auvergne, where the patois poems of my 
kinsman Vermenouze are so recited. The Middle 
Ages have left us many of these historical poems or 
Chansons de Geste, but none of them equal the Chanson 
de Roland. To quote a fine phrase of Mr. Strachey's: 
s 65 



66 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

' ' This great work, bleak, bare, gaunt, majestic, stands 
out like some huge mass of ancient granite on the far 
horizon of the literature of France." 

The old poet knew how to deal with life and death. 
Quarrelsome, chivalrous, brave to temerity, the knights 
that he portrayed in the eleventh century are won- 
derfully like the Frenchmen that we meet to-day. 
Homer himself could not surpass the death of Roland 
as he runs forward, feeling the fog in his throat, and 
throws himself down on the green turf beneath a 
pine with his face to the earth, and then, in one last 
impulse of pride and love, lifts his head and looks 
out towards the great country he has conquered: 
Espaigne la Grant. "And so he falls to thinking of 
several things: the many lands he has overcome, and 
sweet France, and the men of his line, and Charle- 
magne, at whose court he was bred, and the Frenchmen 
who had such faith in him : 

"De plusurs choses k remembrer li prist: 
De dulce France, de humes de sun lign." 

All the modem movement of nationalism, all the cult 
of '7a Terre et les Morts," are presaged in that line! 

The Chanson de Roland is supposed to have been 
written towards 1080. And then for a hundred years 
France produced no veritable masterpiece. That 
nameless old minstrel was like the one bird who, of 
a summer's night, wakes an hour before the others, 
to herald the dawn. About 1160 the full concert 
bursts out in a flood of spontaneous music. 

It is difficult to know what causes a renaissance — 
one of those rare revivals and renewals of beauty and 
mind, invention and creation, which at long intervals 
transfigure the world and inaugurate a new order. I 



THE FIRST RENAISSANCE 67 

think they are always preceded by much coming and 
going on the surface of the earth, vast interchanges of 
ideas and experience among the nations of men. And 
certainly there has rarely been a wider and freer inter- 
course, a more continual come-and-go, than during 
that period of the Crusades. 

France was but a little kingdom during the twelfth 
century. On the east, Provence and Lorraine were 
fiefs of the Empire; Brittany, on the west, owed an 
intermittent allegiance, sometimes to England, some- 
times to France, and remained practically independent 
of either. The King of England owned Normandy, 
Anjou, Aquitaine, Poitou. But the small kingdom of 
France was full of life and possessed a power of expan- 
sion quite out of proportion to its size. If the King 
of England was the feudal suzerain of much land in 
France, the mind of England paid tribute to the 
French. The entire literature of England was French. 
Not only were the French poets and historians wel-. 
comed at the Norman court across the Channel, 
where their works were widely appreciated, but the 
inhabitants of England spoke and wrote in French, 
and some of the oldest and most beautiful examples 
that we possess of mediaeval French poetry were com- 
posed in England by Anglo-Norman writers: Thomas, 
the author of the Roman de Tristan (11 70), Marie de 
France (about the same date), Jordan Fantome 
and others.' And there were other Norman kings 
in Sicily and the South of Italy, whose courts were 
also a centre for the culture of France. And the 
Crusaders bore the influence of their country still 
further afield. From 1099 imtil 1 187 there were French 
kings at Jerusalem and French counts at Joppa; 
the code of laws which they drew up for the govern- 



68 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

ment of their French subjects in the East is one of 
the most curious monuments of their time. In 1204 
a French Empire was founded in Constantinople; 
it lasted nearly sixty years. The Emperor's crown 
was adjudged to Baudouin of Flanders; the Marquis 
of Montferrat was elected King of Macedonia; Ville- 
hardouin was Marshal of Romania (Roumelia), and 
his nephew, Prince of Achaia. There were dukes of 
Athens, dukes of Thrace, dukes of Naxos. There 
were counts of Cephalonia, a sire of Thebes, and a 
seigneur of Corinth. Delicious titles, that seem to 
hail from one of Shakespeare's comedies! But they 
were real enough — were perhaps the most tangible 
result of the Crusades — for all these little French 
courts were fostering places and nursery gardens for 
French culture and for the French language, while, 
in their turn, they communicated to the mother- 
country the secrets and the marvels of the East. 
Trade plied from shore to shore. There was a rich 
French colony at Saint Jean d'Acre, which, for two 
centuries, remained a golden link uniting East and 
West. 

There were eight Crusades between 1095 and 1270; 
and doubtless many of them were irresistible explo- 
sions of faith and enthusiasm, especially the first, and 
those two latter ones due to the saintly and heroic 
impulsion of Saint Louis. But, in all human effort, 
there is an alloy. Others were prompted by the desire 
of wealth; some were political adventures; but, whether 
holy wars, romances of chivalry, or commercial enter- 
prises, these eight heroic expeditions certainly modified 
the course of civilization. Their grandeur was fecund 
and their agitation not in vain, although the heathen 
regained possession of the Holy Sepulchre. The na- 




I B E 



THE FIRST RENAISSANCE 69 

tions learned to know each other: the East was re- 
vealed to them; Richard and Saladin saw each that 
the other was, not a savage, but a very perfect knight. 
The Crusaders brought home with them new arts: 
the weaving in figures of silk and linen, and the metal 
incrustations of Damascus which still preserve the 
city's name (damask, damascene); the glass of Tyr, 
which was imitated at Venice; the gauze or muslin 
of Gaza; the weaving of carpets; the use of cotton; 
also the invention of windmills, so simple, so effica- 
cious. The Crusaders returned with new plants for 
their gardens: Saint Louis brought back the ranun- 
culus, the King of Navarre the Damask rose; and 
new trees for their orchards: the damson or Damask 
plum; the mulberry-tree, which was so greatly to 
enrich both Italy and France; and the sugar-cane, 
which would only grow in Sicily and Spain; and 
doubtless they brought home microbes enough — 
leprosy seems to have become more frequent — and 
a new kind of rat which is now our old black rat. 
But what they especially brought back was a new crop 
of ideas. 

History dates from the Crusades — that is to say, 
French History, for Sidonius ApoUinaris and Gregory 
of Tours, though they wrote of French History, did 
not write in French. Hitherto the vulgar tongue had 
not served for such grand uses. An illiterate society 
does not think of chronicling its daily doings in its 
humble dialect. But when half the feudal society of 
France was transported to the other side of the world, 
those who stayed at home did not stint their questions, 
and those who returned wished to leave their children 
some record of their marvellous campaign. And so, 
after several rude attempts, the Fourth Crusade gave 



70 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

the world the first great modem historian Geoffrey 
de Villehardouin, Seneschal of Champagne and Mar- 
shal of Romania. His Conquest of Constantinople 
(which doubtless he dictated to a secretary) is full of 
those French qualities of sincerity, regularity, and 
noble order which we shall henceforth so often find 
in French literature, and which make us exclaim as we 
recognize them: "Our neighbours are certainly a 
Latin race!" And then the Fifth Crusade brought 
forth a charming example of the quite different type 
of Frenchman, apparently entirely Celtic; Joinville 
is as garrulous, as curious, as familiar and indiscreet, 
as candid and as supple as Montaigne (but not of 
course as intellectual), full of fine shades and life and 
movement; and as he describes the '^saintes paroles 
et bons faits" of his hero, St. Louis (whom he accom- 
panied to the Holy Land), we feel as though we had 
come across some lovable, sweet, and yet heroic trans- 
formation of the Knight of La Mancha and his squire. 
Of all the Crusades, the most profitable to France 
was the one really odious one: the Crusade against the 
Albigeois. It was really a war of the North on the 
South, a struggle between two incompatible civiliza- 
tions; the feudal, Frankish, fighting nobility of France 
and that Romania, now simk in a corrupt if brilliant 
decadence, which still preserved the traditions of 
antiquity. The Albigeois were a pretext — a pretext 
perfectly sincere, for orthodox Catholicism could not 
tolerate the perverse and aristocratic sect which per- 
petuated the most dangerous theories of the Gnostics. 
True, we know the doctrines of the Albigeois chiefly 
from the account of their enemies and persecutors; 
the Cistercians; but this account coincides exactly 
with the teaching of those half-Oriental, half -Slavonic 



THE FIRST RENAISSANCE 71 

apostles of pessimism whose demoralizing specula- 
tions permeated the heresies of the Middle Ages. 
They held that the world is evil, and said that, since 
God is all good, this visible, tangible world is not His 
work at all, but the creation of some vile competitor 
and demiurge, whom we abet when we enter the realm 
of action — if we marry, or work, or enrol ourselves in 
a church. "And they said, but in secret, that the 
Christ who was bom visibly in an earthly Bethlehem 
was an evil spirit, but that the real Christ had never 
eaten, nor drunk, nor appeared to human eyes, for 
He had been bom and died for us in a new and invi- 
sible sphere." And to that sphere, only after seven 
lives of penance and renunciation, endured successively 
in seven earthly incarnations — only so may, at last, 
the Pure and the Perfect attain. 

The Middle Ages took their religion very seriously, 
and doubtless the spread of these speculations filled 
the pious with a holy horror. The theories of the 
Cathares (the Pure) seemed to have reached the South 
of France — especially Toulouse and Albi — at the very 
beginning of the eleventh century and to have spread 
all through Languedoc; to Poitiers and even to Cham- 
pagne, rooting themselves in those half-mystical, 
half-sensual literary cliques and "Courts of Love" 
where the troubadours had prepared the ground for 
them by the elaboration of an extraordinary tenuity 
of sentiment. To them also the invisible and the un- 
possessed was dearer than all that we can touch and 
own and know. They, too, said that marriage was 
incompatible with passion, and the Countess of Cham- 
pagne proclaimed as a law, ''Amor em non posse suas 
inter duos conjugates extender e vires.'" Full of ultra- 
refinement and unreality as they were, these little 



72 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

courts of Provence, of Languedoc, and of Champagne 
were, none the less, important to the future: their 
subtle, mystic, sentimental lore prepared the way for 
a greater poetry, for a still more mysterious feeling, 
the love of Dante for Beatrice in heaven, the sonnets 
of Petrarch to his absent Laura. 

All through the eleventh and twelfth centuries Albi, 
Toulouse, Beziers, Carcassonne had been centres of a 
brilliant civilization. Luxury, elegance, poetry, poli- 
tical independence, lifted them into another sphere 
from the rude feudalism of the North. There was a 
curious antipathy between the two races: the long- 
haired, rustic Prankish warriors and hunters, and 
these men of the South, with their music and their 
manners, "shaved like actors, with their smooth, 
short hair, their ridiculous pointed boots — men with- 
out faith or law — the vainest and lightest-minded of 
the human kind," as Radulph Glaber described them 
in the eleventh century. He said, too, that the lax- 
ness of their morals corresponded with the heresy of 
their religious views. And this mutual dislike and 
distrust persisted from age to age; so that at last, in 
1208, the enemies of the Southerners united against 
them: the Papacy, resolved to exterminate the Mani- 
chees; the feudal barons, jealous of the riches and the 
culture of a chivalry too different from their own ideal; 
the king, desirous of an effective suzerainty over the 
South, still foreign in laws, language, manners, customs 
from the France beyond the Loire. 

A crusade was declared against the Albigeois, and 
the war was without pity. In July 1209, fifty thou- 
sand Frenchmen marched against Beziers, and fifteen 
thousand persons in the town and district alone were 
put to the sword. The Count of Toulouse — one of 



THE FIRST RENAISSANCE 73 

the six fundamental peers of France — was dethroned, 
like the lords of Beziers and Narbonne. Little by 
little the King of France annexed most of their pos- 
sessions, with the provinces of Aunis, Poitou, Perigord, 
and the Limousin. Before twenty years were out, 
the monarchy had conquered all the South of France, 
west of the Rhone, to within four leagues of the city 
of Toulouse. The royal authority stretched from the 
Channel to the Atlantic coast. France was one, that, 
hitherto, had always been twain. There was no longer 
any Romania in Gaul. The separate civilization of 
the South had perished ; the Gaie Science was no more. 

But, in dying, the poetry of the troubadours, and 
all that went with it, fertilized the literature of the 
conqueror, and, mingling there with another new and 
strange element — the Celtic Spirit — produced a won- 
derful efflorescence, one of the most extraordinary 
revivals of art and letters that the world has witnessed. 
We know how to trace the influence of the South. 
But whence came that sudden invasion of the Celtic 
Spirit? Whence drifted into France that subtle, 
mystic, sentimental charm? There are few greater 
problems in literature. Our doctors disagree; Gaston 
Paris opines that the Arthurian legend penetrated 
into France from England and the Anglo-Norman 
poets of the English court; Wendelin Foerster and 
Joseph Bedier believe that the French courtly poets 
heard of Guinevere and Lancelot, of Tristan and 
Yseult, from the ragged wandering harpers of Brittany 
and Wales who roamed from castle to castle and from 
fair to fair, chanting to their tiny rote or harp, in their 
uncouth foreign tongue, tales that charmed away the 
dullness and the chill of mediaeval winter. 

Is it not likely that the story of the Round Table 



74 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

filtered down from above, welled up from below, 
simultaneously? In the Roman de Renart the strolling 
foreign harper says to Ysengrin, the wolf: 

" Je fot saver bon lai Breton 
Et di Merlin, et di Foucon, 

Del roi Artus et di Tristan.". . . 
" Et sais-tu le lai Dame Yset?" 

"Ya-ia," dit-il, "God is toiiet!" (God is to wit.) 

But the great ladies, in their fine language, told the 
same tales as the wandering minstrels from overseas 
in their abominable jargon; since we know that Chre- 
tien de Troyes owed the inspiration of his story about 
Lancelot {La Charrette) to the Countess of Champagne. 
The poet leaves us no doubt on the subject: 

Matiere et sens en donne et livre 

La Comtesse, et il s'entremet 
De penser, si que rien n'y met 

Que sa peine et s'attention. 

It was probably at the learned, literary courts of 
Alienor of Aquitaine (Queen of first France and then 
of England) and of her two charming daughters: 
Aelis, Countess of Blois, and Marie, Countess of 
Champagne, that the civilization of the South fused 
with the Breton legends imported from England, and 
produced that marvellous explosion of poetry and 
romance. Those elegant and amorous little courts 
had each its laureate. Gautier d'Arras lived and 
wrote at the court of Blois. Chretien de Troyes was 
the glory of the court of Champagne; and Chretien 
was a really considerable poet — something akin to 
Tennyson and Racine — and what is more, after all 
these years, a really interesting poet. All our con- 



THE FIRST RENAISSANCE 75 

ception of the Arthurian legend can be traced to him; 
he it was, even more than Geoffrey of Monmouth, 
who turned the savage Breton heroes and queens 
into feudal knights and ladies who speak finement 
and love finement — as people spoke and loved at the 
court of Marie de Champagne. In his romantic 
poems, Chretien is the creator of the French psycho- 
logical novel; there is but a step between his Charrette 
and the Princesse de Cleves. He wrote with a colour, 
a sentiment, a delicacy, a sense of style, hitherto 
unknown in "the rustic Roman tongue." The nature 
of French literature is already defined; its keenness 
of observation, its interest in things as well as in per- 
sons, its sentimental perspicacity, its subtle analysis, 
its purity of expression. If, in Chretien, there are 
passages that seem to foreshadow Racine, there are 
in a contemporary novel in verse, UEscoufle, descrip- 
tions of fashionable life, portraits of places, elegant 
interiors, oddly mixed with psychological hair-splitting 
that suggest Paul Bourget. 

After the poets came the master-builders. This 
Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is 
the heroic age of the French cathedrals. First a style 
of grandeur and simplicity, a transition from the pure 
Roman (or as we say, Norman) architecture to early 
Gothic: long rows of tall pillars, cloistered columns 
in the clerestory overhead, slender towers of many 
stories: a great impression of nobility and charm. 
Then in the thirteenth century an ever increasing rich- 
ness, a huge mass of extraordinarily varied life, a 
people of statues (550 in the portal of Reims), and 
all living, smiling, praying, brooding, full of signifi- 
cance and truth; deep, cavernous porches, full of 
shadow; and the mystical rose of the central window, 



76 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

streaming with colour and symbolic imagery and won- 
derful light; vaulted naves and quires a hundred feet 
high, under whose solemn loftiness man sinks to an 
insect's stature. The real poetry of the French Middle 
Ages is builded and carved in stone. But, in kind and 
style and period, its progress still keeps step with that 
of the written word; and the Cathedral of Laon is to 
the Cathedral of Reims just what the Chanson de 
Roland — restrained, severe, sublime — is to the poignant, 
mysterious, pathetic romance of Tristan or of Arthur. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 
La Chanson de Roland. 

Works of Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Froissart, etc. 
Gaston Paris: La Poesie frangaise au May en Age. 

La Litterature frangaise au Moyen Age. 

Poemes et Legendes du Moyen Age. 
Joseph Bedier: Les Fabliaux. 

M. Borodine: La Femme et V Amour au XII^ Steele. 
Charles Oulmont: La Poesie frangaise au Moyen Age. 
Victor Duruy : Histoire de France. 
Prevost-Paradol: Essai sur l' Histoire universelle, t. ii. 



CHAPTER V 

THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR 

At the end of the first Renaissance, France was fairer, 
richer, freer than she had been for a thousand years, 
full of liberties, poems, and cathedrals. 

The sons of the burghers had their seat in council 
in face of the nobles and the clergy. 

Never since Charlemagne had the king been so power- 
ful. 

Peace and order, industry and commerce, art and 
letters, seem so firmly established; the country appears 
so quietly and naturally outgrowing the system of feudal 
society, that we might imagine for the morrow the 
France of Francis I, when suddenly there breaks out the 
Great War — the Hundred Years' War — and behold all 
Western civilization replunged in the abyss. 

Yet, as we look closer into that waste of carnage and 
ruin which is the French fourteenth century, we find 
in it, none the less, fair and promising spaces; we find 
in it, above all, the source of two streams of tendency 
which will augment with every reign and continue to 
modify the future. They will contribute to the Growth 
of France, and to discover them is our object in this 
chapter. 

But first of all, let us explain the sudden lapse into 
barbarism. 

77 



78 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

Of all the abuses of feudalism, the most disastrous 
was the doubtful and varying law of female succession, 
different in every country, almost in every province, 
and directly responsible for most of the French wars 
in this and the succeeding centiu-y. 

Let us say nothing of our own Empress Maud, who 
bequeathed Normandy to her son, Henry. That son, 
Henry II of England, married in 1154 the divorced 
wife of the King of France, Louis VII. . . . When 
King Louis, that monk enthroned, returning from a 
five-year-long Crusade, discovered that his wife had 
beguiled the time of his absence too agreeably in Paris, 
and forthwith repudiated his Queen, he was more 
mindful of his honour as a husband than of his duty 
as a king. For Queen Alienor was a great heiress. 
She owned nearly half the South of France, and took 
with her to the arms of Henry of England Aquitaine, 
Poitou, Saintonge, Perigord, Auvergne, and Limou- 
sin. Henry inherited Normandy from his mother, 
Anjou, Touraine, and Maine from his father, and he 
married his son to the heiress of Brittany. . , . Here 
was a fruitful source of conflict, augmented in the 
following century when the daughter of Philippe-le- 
Bel, King of France, married the son of King Edward 
of England. 

The three sons of Philippe-le-Bel all reigned and 
all died young, leaving no male heirs. In 1328 the 
throne was empty. There were two claimants: Phi- 
lippe de Valois, cousin-german of the last three kings, 
nephew of Philippe-le-Bel and grandson of Philippe 
III; and Edward III, King of England, grandson of 
Philippe-le-Bel. Which was the nearest in succession: 
the son of Philippe's daughter? or the son of the 
daughter of Philippe's son? The question is nice. 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR 79 

We know how the assembly of Senhs decided in a 
similar conjuncture. They plumped for the French- 
man and let the lawyers say their say. 

Though Edward of England had accepted the hard 
fact of his kinsman's accession, and had even done 
him an unwilling homage for his French fief of Aqui- 
taine, yet he continued to brood over his rights — and 
his wrongs! For there can be no doubt that Philippe 
VI, jealous of Edward's claim, put many a spoke in 
the King of England's wheel, both in Scotland and in 
Flanders. The fatal day dawned when a long-smoul- 
dering enmity broke into a flame. On the 12th of 
July, 1346, Edward landed on the coast of Normandy 
with an expeditionary force of thirty-two thousand 
men. He little thought that, with pauses and abate- 
ments, the war with France would last a hundred 
years. 

At Crecy, the first onslaught of the English was 
terrible. Inferior in numbers to the French, the 
English forces were an army, disciplined, armed, and 
acting in concert, while in the eyes of the chivalry of 
France a battle was a tournament, in which every 
knight fought for his own glory and his own hand. 
The English set their archers in the first line of battle 
with the knights well behind, much as in our days the 
artillery prepares and covers the onslaught of the 
infantry; the French, in theory, adopted the same 
disposition, but in the heat of combat, the foolhardy 
French heroes rode down their own bowmen to get 
the quicker at our cool islanders, and massacred their 
own infantry in their eagerness for some marvellous 
exploit. They fell in their masses: twelve hundred 
knights, thirty thousand infantry, until a number 
equal to the attacking force of England lay there dead 



8o FEUDAL SOCIETY 

upon the ground. For the English fought at Cr^cy 
like professional soldiers well equipped with the muni- 
tion of the time: their arrows rained "fast as snow," 
and, for the first time in history, cannon were employed 
to stay and strengthen the bowmen's impetuous 
attack. 

No words can tell the scorn, the anger, of the French 
burghers who had thought to find in their turbulent 
and tyrannous nobles at least an inexpugnable de- 
fence. Crecy rang the first knell that tolled the end 
of chivalry. 

The French nobles had no better luck ten years 
later (1356) at Poitiers. Here the French King was 
taken prisoner: Jean-le-Bon, the son of Philippe VI. 
As we read of him and our Black Prince in Jean-le- 
Bel's or Froissart's chronicles, of their gentle cour- 
tesy and chivalrous courage, their self-reliance and 
self-sacrifice, our hearts beat high to hear of such 
noble knights, as worthy as any hero of antiquity in 
Plutarch's Lives. The accomplished chivalry of the 
French made, as it were, an aureole round their defeat. 
We see them in London, feasted like guests in their 
noble, ample prison, and feel how far more akin they 
were to any knight of England than to any churl of 
France. And the churls of France felt that also! 
And, in their matter-of-fact and simple reckoning, 
they calculated that a chivalry in captive exile, how- 
ever gracious, was a luxury that they could do without. 

The ftill price of that luxury they paid at Bretigny 
in 1360, when the English King exacted the whole 
dowry of his ancestress. Queen Alienor: Aquitaine, 
Poitou, Perigord, and the rest, with Calais, Guisnes, 
Montreuil, and Ponthieu in the North. In vain the 
population of these provinces protested. "We may 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR 8i 

own the English with our lips [said the citizens of La 
Rochelle], never with our hearts!" And for a whole 
year they refused to open their gates to Edward's army. 
The States-General were summoned, and met in 
Paris in 1356. Etienne Marcel, the Mayor of Paris, 
was one of the deputies; he was a draper or cloth- 
merchant, the head of the democratic party, a man 
of experience, courage, and public spirit. Chiefly 
through his influence, in that hour of rout and defeat, 
when the chivalry of France had failed her, when the 
King was in a foreign prison, the States-General 
assumed the burden of government, meeting four years 
in succession, forming the mind of the young Prince 
Regent: it is in some degree owing to Etienne Marcel 
that Charles V was to prove one of the best kings 
that France has ever had. Unfortunately, these two 
rulers, heads of such different factions: the Regent 
with his traditions of chivalry, Etienne Marcel with 
his new, dim conceptions of a representative govern- 
ment, fell out, naturally enough, and came to blows. 
Marcel, who had fortified Paris, bought and installed 
the H6tel-de-Ville, instituted a permanent commis- 
sion of reforms, forgot that the man who means to 
go far goes slowly. He countenanced a revolution, 
sought to intimidate, if not to imprison, the Regent, 
and was assassinated in 1358. But he has left a name 
in history. Had he succeeded, had the States-General 
been summoned at frequent intervals, had the King 
been compelled to consult with them, France would 
have conquered her freedom. But, going too fast and 
too far, he disgusted the monarchy with a means of 
government which had opened the door to revolution. 
Charles V (who, if he was Etienne's opponent, was 
also Etienne's pupil) will summon the States-General 

6 



82 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

again, in 1363, and 1369. But after his death they 
will meet but fifteen times in the four hundred years 
that separate the closing fourteenth century from 
the reign of Louis XVI. And more and more the 
kings of France will love their own good pleasure in 
contradistinction to the conscience of their subjects. 
Milon de Dormans, Bishop of Beauvais, Chancellor 
of France in 1383, could write the golden sentence: 
"Though they should deny it a hundred times, kings 
only reign through the suffrage of their peoples." 
The words rang true enough in the times of Charles 
the Wise; they would have appeared rank heresy to 
Louis XIV. 

In the midst of that forlorn French fourteenth cen- 
tury, the reign of Charles V blooms out like an oasis. 
The war with England continued, with armistices and 
interludes, but the King contrived to control the civil 
quarrels and fights of the feudal nobles (of whom so 
many, fortunately, were prisoners in England), and 
he rid the country of still more dangerous customers 
by sending away to fight the battles of France in 
Portugal the companies of professional soldiers whom 
a truce with England left unemployed, and who gener- 
ally, in the interval between two campaigns, ravaged 
and battened on the unfortunate country that em- 
ployed them. When war flared out again, the King 
collected the wealth and the population of France in 
her fortified towns and camps, and left the already 
devastated country defenceless to its fate. The 
English marched through this desert hungrily, found 
no grange to plunder and no bone to pick, until, tired 
of starving, they recrossed the Channel, discouraged by 
their bootless raid; they had scarce seen the face of 
a Frenchman. If the letters of Petrarch and the 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR 83 

ballades of Eustache Deschamps show us how miser- 
able were the abandoned fields and vineyards of 
France, the towns, gorged with stores, were by no 
means unprosperous. They were the hope of Charles; 
he showered grants and privileges upon them: pri- 
vileges so enviable that, one by one, the French cities 
conquered and held by the English King slipped from 
his grasp, and offered themselves to their own country, 
until by 1380, of all their Gallic conquests, the English 
retained only a few ports and seaboard towns: Calais, 
Cherbourg, Brest, Bayonne, and Bordeaux. For a 
moment the invasion seemed stopped. 

But war and trade were not the sole concern of 
Charles; he was a student and a lover of ideas: to any 
young historian in search of a job, I would recommend 
the growth of intellectual France under the reign of 
Charles the Wise. Justice has scarce been rendered 
to the movement and spread of ideas in France be- 
tween, say, 1360 and 1380; and but for those wars 
and battles by which we date our histories (yet which, 
rightly considered, are often merely interruptions to 
history), the splendid outburst of art and letters which 
glorified France a hundred and fifty years later might 
have quietly succeeded to the rule of the Wise King. 
The Paris of Charles the Wise was little less occupied 
with antiquity than the Paris of Francis I (it was not 
quite the same antiquity: Aristotle, Boethius, Seneca 
were the names to conjure with). Humanists, trans- 
lators, geographers, historians, were the darlings of 
the court. The intellectual contact with Italy was 
established, and an Italian, Christina of Pisa, was 
one of the great French authors of her time. ... If 
I insist on these apparently unimportant details, it is 
because, in this court of the Wise King, the seed was 



84 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

sown of moral and mental influences which will more 
and more affect the growth of France. Every one 
knows that France went hungry during the Hundred 
Years' War, that fields were fallow, villages in ruin, 
roads overgrown and made a wilderness. It is surely 
as important to date the rise of that half-romantic, 
half-stoical temper, which more and more will seem 
to us peculiarly French, and to trace to their source 
those political and moral ideas which then emerge 
from the doctrines and dogmas of the Middle Ages. 
The notion of the State — on the one hand a passionate 
conception of its unity and absolute authority; on 
the other hand a no less passionate affirmation of the 
rights of the private persons who compose it: the 
Rights of Man, Vuniversite du commun peuple — is a 
twi-fronted ideal that preoccupies and divides the 
mind of France. In the pages of Gerson, Christine 
de Pisan, the Monk of Saint Denis, and their contem- 
poraries, there is a warmth of conscience, a sense of 
political ethics, which has caused an American histo- 
rian (Miss Maud E. Temple) to compare the philo- 
sophers and historians of the reign of Charles the 
Wise with our own Victorian Radicals, J. S. Mill and 
his followers. 

For several centuries thenceforward we shall watch 
the great political parties (which then begin to disen- 
gage themselves) gradually arrive at their perfection: 
Absolutists and Democrats fighting at first, as it were, 
in masks or in mufti; feebly essaying their principles 
under a disguise as Armagnacs and Burgundians, or 
as Catholics and Huguenots; while their inner signifi- 
cance gradually deepens and spreads until they learn 
what they really want and what they really mean; 
until at last each party in turn possesses the whole of 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR S5 

France, to essay its final experiment, the one with the 
autocracy of Louis XIV, the other with the Great 
Revolution. 

And then the Wise King died. And France, so 
near recovered, fell back again into the bottomless 
pit. For the successor of Charles the Wise was Charles 
the Mad. The Hundred Years' War broke out anew. 
The marriage of Charles VI to Isabeau of Bavaria 
brought up to court a wave of German bad taste and 
worse morals. And it was not for another century 
that the sense of culture, art, ideas, revived and formed 
the great Renaissance. 

The chief feature of this second period of the Hun- 
dred Years' War was the civil conflict which compli- 
cated its horrors. The mad King had a brother, 
Louis, Duke of Orleans, a man infinitely subtle, gifted, 
amorous, and cruel. He was the head and front of 
the aristocratic party: that party which was per- 
meated with the new ideas that, from Italy, had drifted 
into France — theories of despotism, of the divine right 
of princes — apologies for the absolute authority of 
autocrats. . . . The Duke had views of his own on 
Italy. He had married the daughter of Giangaleazzo 
Visconti, the Despot of Milan. 

He was at the head of the party which first was 
caUed Orleanist and afterwards Armagnac: the party 
of the rich, the party also of the South, those whose 
ideal was Imperial Rome as opposed to those whose 
half-conscious ideal was the democratic cities of Flan- 
ders. This upholder of the divine right of princes, 
this head of a strong aristocratic party, would fain 
have carved for himself a kingdom in Italy (that 
kingdom of Adria whose phantom history I once 
meant to write), and though nothing came of his 



86 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

dream, yet, because of all the intrigues it entailed, 
the coiirt of Louis of Orleans was a centre for all 
Italianate influences in France. 
Such was Louis of Orleans — 

Tristifer, tristi^ce portant, 

Et, tout fut il jolis, 
Trop sembloit il merencolis, 
Qui le cuer a plus dur que fer, 

as Burcarius describes him. Over against him we must 
set his cousin, Jean-sans-Peur (John Dreadnought), 
Duke of Burgundy, a small, ugly man {"barbu, brun, et 
bienaime," says Burcarius), blunt, and brutal as a bull- 
dog ; restless, violent, demagogic as a burgher of Ghent ; 
the blood of his Flemish mother ran hot in his veins. 

"And the burghers and people of France [says 
Monstrelet], adored this Duke of Burgimdy, because 
they believed that, if he undertook the government, 
he would put down throughout the kingdom all salt- 
taxes, imposts, levies, and other dues and subsidies 
with which the people were charged in excess of their 
conventions." 

Already the King had begun to transgress the Bud- 
get of the States-General. Five-and-twenty years 
after the death of Charles the Wise there was no 
trace left of the prosperity which the Wise King had 
conjured up amid the desolation of war-ravaged pro- 
vinces. " Say not the land of France [complains 
the Rector of the University of Paris whom we know 
by his Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris] — Say not the 
land of France, but rather the Terre Deserte." There 
was not a village in France but the two factions split 
it in twain; men looked askance at their neighbours 
and flung at each other's heads the deadly accusa- 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR 87 

tion: "Armagnac!" or " Bourguignon ! " In order 
to have a man killed (says Juvenal des Ursins), it was 
necessary to say: " Cestuy-ld est Armagnac I" And 
almost every rich person was supposed to be an 
Armagnac. 

Louis of Orleans came to a violent end. On the 
20th of November, 1407, his cousin of Burgundy had 
him murdered in the streets of Paris as he was rid- 
ing home one night after a supper with the Queen 
(that sister-in-law of his with whom his relations were 
the subject of so much Burgundian scandal), but the 
disappearance of the leader had only inflamed the 
passions of his party. In the ardour of conflict, Bur- 
gundians and Armagnacs alike forgot the English 
invader, less odious than the hostile fellow-countryman. 
In 141 3 Jean-sans-Peur occupied Paris and took the 
Bastille. With the butchers of Paris on his right 
(they were the richest corporation in the city) and the 
University on the left, eager to fight his battle either 
with bludgeon or with pen, Jean-sans-Peur feared no 
one. But set a butcher on horseback ! The inevitable 
defect of the French reformer is to go too fast and too 
far. Just like Etienne Marcel, the butchers got cross. 
They sent the Armagnacs spinning but it was the other 
burghers of Paris who soon tired of their revolutionary 
tyranny. They recalled the Armagnacs, who re-entered 
the capital in 1414. 

No one seems to have given a thought to the English. 

And 141 5 is the date of Agincourt! 

When, on the eve of battle, the burghers of Paris 
offered six thousand cross-bowmen, from their commu- 
nal train bands, to the Duke of Berry, "What do we 
want with the shopkeepers?" exclaimed one of the 
Armagnac leaders. 



88 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

Yet on the 25th of October, 1415 the battle of Agin- 
court was the third act of the feudal tragedy. After 
Crecy, after Poitiers, here was another triumph for 
"the crooked stick and the grey goosewing": the 
English yeomen with their bows and arrows vanquished 
again the tempestuous knights of France. Ten thou- 
sand Frenchmen lay prone upon the field. But the 
victorious army was too exhausted to pursue its 
advantage, and made its way to Calais only to return 
to England. 

The Dauphin of France and the Armagnac leaders 
were to fight the Englishman's battles as effectually as 
any yeomen of the shires. And, indeed, from the first 
the people of Paris laid the whole blame of this im- 
mense defeat upon the Armagnacs. The Duke of 
Burgundy and his party had not fought against the 
English at Agincourt; his prestige was intact; it was 
he who negotiated with the enemy. "Had he been in 
power!" said the populace, and regretted the violence 
of the butchers. In June, 141 8, there was a terrible 
rising of the masses in Paris; all who bore the name 
of Armagnac were slain — more than a thousand per- 
sons in four-and-twenty hours. The Dauphin of 
France fled to Melun and thence to Loches. Once 
more Jean-sans-Peur of Burgundy entered the capital 
amid the enthusiastic clamours of the people. 

Meanwhile the English, restored, refreshed, and 
alert, had taken Rouen and were marching on Paris. 
When Jean-sans-Peur proposed a peace, the English 
King (our Henry V) answered : ' ' Yes ! — with the French 
King's daughter given in marriage! And her dowry 
shall be Aquitaine, Normandy, Brittany, Maine, 
Anjou, and Touraine." Burgundy hesitated — for this 
was more than that dowry of Alienor which, for so 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR 89 

many centuries, had rendered the unity of France 
impossible. 

What was to be done against an enemy in power, 
and so preposterous? The only possible course was 
to spin out the negotiations and gain time, which 
Jean-sans-Peur did to the best of his ability. In the 
face of the possible abolition of France, Armagnacs 
and Bourguignons agreed to bury the hatchet and act 
together in a sort of sacred union. The chiefs of 
either party, Jean-sans-Peur and the Dauphin, con- 
sented to meet on neutral ground and draw up the 
tenets of their coalition. A solemn interview took 
place on the loth of September, 141 9. The two 
princes, each attended by ten gentlemen, met on the 
bridge of Montereau, their several armies ranged be- 
hind them at some distance along the different banks 
of the river. What happened will probably always 
remain uncertain. Although we know the names of 
the persons present and all the details of the scene, it 
is difficult to understand what it was that made a 
serious and courtly conference, in so grave an hour of 
national disaster, suddenly change and darken into a 
stormy skirmish. The Dauphin — the young heir-ap- 
parent — was but a child of sixteen. His father was 
mad, and he himself of a nervous constitution. When 
he saw in front of him the avowed murderer of his 
uncle, that Jean-sans-Peur whom all his partizans 
painted blacker than the Devil, did the lad make some 
inconsiderate, frightened gesture which his followers 
interpreted amiss? . . . There was a struggle, a 
cry of "Kill! Kill! TuezI" One of the Dauphin's 
men took his young master in his arms and carried 
him off the bridge. When, a minute later, the mass 
of hurtling figures disentangled, Jean-sans-Peur of 



90 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

Burgundy was discovered dead, his skull cleft by a 
blow from an axe. 

The tragedy of Montereau proved a profitable 
victory for the English. In their wrath, their loath- 
ing for the Armagnacs, the whole Burgundian party 
flung itself into the arms of England, and concluded 
with the invader that shameftil treaty of Troyes 
whereby the Dauphin was declared unapt to wear the 
crown, and the kingdom of France bequeathed, after 
the death of its mad monarch, to Henry of England, 
by virtue of his marriage with the Princess Catherine. 
A year later the son of that union was bom, heir to a 
double throne, and while he was still in his swaddling 
clothes his two grandfathers departed this life: Henry 
the Victorious, King of England; Charles the Mad, 
King of France. 

And the disinherited Dauphin fled to the further 
side the Loire, where the provinces of the South 
greeted him as a hero, called him the Avenger of 
Orleans and the Vanquisher of Burgundy, lauded him 
to the skies, and made his exile seem a triumph. 

SOURCES CONSULTED : 
Chronicles of Jean-le-Bel. 

Froissart. 

Juvenal des Ursins. 

Le religieux de Saint-Denis. 

Monstrelet. 
Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris. 
BuRCARius: Le Pastoralct. 

Histories of France, by J. Michelet, Victor Duruy, E. Lavisse. 
AuGUSTiN Thierry : Essai sur I'Histoire du Tiers-Etat. 
Simeon Luce: La France pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans. 
Marquis de Beaucourt: Histoire de Charles VII. 
Miss M. E. Temple: Essays in the Romanic Review, vol. vi. 
Mary Darmesteter (Madame Duclaux) : Froissart. 

Grands Ecrivains Frangais. 
Mary Robinson: (Madame Duclaux): The End of the Middle Ages. 



CHAPTER VI 

DELIVERANCE 

The chivalry of France had failed the country at 
Crecy, at Poitiers, and at Agincourt. But a knight 
was on the road who should redeem their errors, rout 
the English out of France, and restore the King. 

The people of France, mad with wrath and shame, 
had risen against the knights in ill-combined revolts 
and insurrections which in no wise harmed the English, 
but lacerated the martyred body of their country. 
And now a daughter of the people arose to bind those 
wounds, to breathe life into a dying frame, to bring 
peace from without and peace within. 

This Maiden-Knight, this saviour of her country 
was of course Joan of Arc. She transformed her King 
as she transformed her country; she made of a down- 
hearted, decadent prince the wise organizer of the 
monarchy. For France and the French are of such a 
nature that, when they are confident in their right 
and might, no miracle of bravery or success is difficult 
to them, whereas, if you rob them of that intimate 
self-assurance, their defeat is a foregone conclusion. 

For the first five years after the swift-following 
deaths of Henry V of England and Charles VI of 
France, the war remained at a standstill, the English 

91 



g2 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

predominating north of the Loire, and the party of 
the Dauphin in the South. At Windsor, the King of 
France and England was a Httle boy: a babe of nine 
months old when two crowns fell into the cradle. The 
child's French mother married a squire from Wales, 
one Owen Tudor (and thus became the grandmother 
of Henry VII). She had little influence with her son, 
Henry VI, who was in all things the ward and pupil 
of his English uncles. 

The other King of France, the Dauphin, reigned in 
Berry: men called him "the King of Bourges." He 
was a melancholy and disheartened youth; kindly, 
gentle, pious, interested in books and in experiments, 
a patron of the new artillery; but to all appearance 
essentially a private person. His spirit had been 
broken by the ambush of Montereau and by the en- 
suing treaty with the English, wherein his own mother 
had declared him inapt to reign, preferring in his 
place his sister Catherine (now the bride of Owen 
Tudor); what wonder if the young man pondered in 
his heart if he were not base-born? His mother's 
reputation made the thing likely enough! He seemed 
no redoubtable rival for his infant nephew at Windsor. 

The people murmured that there was no getting 
sight of him. And in fact by choice he lived seques- 
tered in his beautiful castle of Mehun-sur-Yevre, one 
of the wonders of the French Renaissance, stored with 
the pictures, the coins, the library, the treasure which 
his uncle, the great collector Jean de Berry, had united 
there; he lived among these curiosities like one of 
those courtly connaisseurs — some Count of Blois or of 
Champagne — whose enlightened patronship proved so 
important to the annals of culture, and of so little 
account in the history of France. 



DELIVERANCE 93 

During those five years a division of France appeared 
imminent, with the Loire for the frontier Hne — that 
Loire which still appeared a suture feebly sewn, which 
any quarrel, any effort, might rip open. South of the 
Loire, the Armagnacs were all for Charles; north of 
the Loire, the Burgundians inclined to England. In 
those difficult years we see all the latent dualism of 
France — that uneasy marriage of North and South, 
of Frank and Roman, of federalism and unity, of the 
democrat and the autocrat — on which the succeeding 
centuries will play a score of variations. But then, 
as more than once before and since, a foreign invasion 
conjured the peril of civil war. 

One day the English Regent awoke to the fact that 
his hold, south of the Loire, grew weaker day by day, 
and he remembered that his little nephew claimed the 
South no less than the North — the South, the veritable 
heritage of Alienor of Aquitaine. In an evil hour for 
them, the English crossed the Loire and attacked the 
Dauphin in his vital parts. They opened the campaign 
by the siege of Orleans. We know that which fol- 
lows: how at first all went well with them — the sixty 
forts they built roimd Orleans town, the blockade 
continued through the winter and spring of 1428, the 
hunger and despair of the unfortunate townspeople, and 
how they offered to surrender, if not to England, at least 
to Burgundy, and how the Regent refused that proposal 
saying that English blood had won the town and that 
it was the due prize of English valour. The Dauphin 
made no effort to come to the rescue, and mused instead 
upon his own retreat, hesitating whether to prefer Pro- 
vence or Scotland. . . . For Orleans it appeared the 
very crack of doom. And yet the town was saved ! 

For the second time in the history of France a vil- 



94 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

lage lass of seventeen repulsed a horde of terrible in- 
vaders! Joan is indeed the very soiil of her nation — 
all France incarnate in the bright face of a girl! As 
first she emerges from her enchanted oakwood full of 
fairy-rings and holy wells and mysterious voices, she 
seems to us another Velleda, a Druid priestess; but 
the pious Maid who saves her country by virtue of 
her faith, of her hope (when no men hoped in France), 
and of that fervid charity we call compassion — the 
Maid of Orleans appears the sister of Genevieve, 
the Gallo-Roman girl who repelled the Huns. And the 
young knight in armour who rides to aid the King, 
vowed to a great and desperate "emprise," is surely 
akin to Roland or to Galahad, or to some knight of the 
Arthurian tales. And, alas! on the market-place of 
Rouen, the murdered Maid, the martyred Saint, is it 
not Blandine who died of old at Lyons? 

It is the most wonderful story in the world since 
that more than earthly story which came to a close on 
Calvary. ... I have neither time nor skill to tell 
it here: who has not read it in the account of Joan's 
trial? Or in Michelet, or in Quicherat, or in Vallet 
de Viriville, or in Simeon Luce? Or, again, in the 
recent pages of Anatole France, or of our own Andrew 
Lang, or the prose-poems of Charles Peguy? No 
need for me to write of Joan of Arc. But the briefest 
survey of the History of France would be incomplete 
without its passage in her honour. 

Her courage and impulse, her gaiety, her faith and 
her innocence fell like dew on the parched and perish- 
ing spirit of King and country. She went to the 
doubting Dauphin, secretly afraid to count himself his 
father's son and rightful heir: ''Sire" she declared, 
"ew nom Dieu, c'est vous et non auUresT' She said 



DELIVERANCE 95 

she knew it from her heavenly patrons, "Saint Louis 
and Saint Charlemagne," both Kings of France — and, 
in the eyes of the Maid, one was as true a Saint as the 
other. Thus, with a more than royal touch, she healed 
her prince's secret evil. 

When the troops saw that Virgin riding in their 
midst, seated on her grey charger, her lance at rest, 
armed at all points as a knight, her black tresses fall- 
ing thick and short round her pensive, oval face lit up 
with a heavenly certitude of victory, they thought her 
a knight out of Paradise, some herald-angel sent to 
France. "Semble chose toute divine de son faict, et 
de la voir et de Vouu,'' wrote the Sire de Laval to his 
mother. As she waved her troops across the Loire, 
bidding them charge the invader with all their might 
and main, her instinct affirmed the road to victory for 
any French army; that is to say, attack, fury, sacrifice 
of self, and absolute faith in a leader. 

The spell of terror and hopelessness which had hung 
like a fog over France was dispelled by the innocent 
magic of her courage and faith: on the 8th of May, 
1429, Orleans was delivered; a little later the "King 
of Bourges" was crowned at Reims and acclaimed 
by a triumphant army King of France. The English 
cause was lost; but the English are obstinate: it took 
another twenty years to drive them into the sea. 
Fresh troops poured across the Channel: on the 23d 
of May, 1430 the Maid herself was taken prisoner at 
Compiegne. We know how she was carried to Rouen, 
tried there by our countrymen for a witch, handed 
over to the tender mercies of the Church as a heretic, 
and how, on the 30th of May one year later (and two 
years since that happy May when she had entered 
Orleans delivered), the Maid was taken to the Old 



96 FEUDAL SOCIETY 

Market-place at Rouen, her shaven head crowned with 
a paper cap on which was written : ' ' Heretic, Apostate, 
Idolater," tied weeping to a stake, and burned alive, 
and the very ashes of her body thrown into the Seine, 

Like Plato's Just Man, reviled, thrown into prison, 
scourged, blinded, and put to death, yet still enviable, 
salutary to the State, Joan, on her Calvary, ensured 
the salvation of France. In 1435 the Duke of Bur- 
gundy concluded a treaty with King Charles; soon 
after, Paris rose suddenly against its English garrison 
and declared for France; twelve years later, Rouen 
followed suit; in 1450, the loss of Cherbourg left Eng- 
land not one foot of Norman ground, and the follow- 
ing year deprived her of her last hold on the South, 
By 1453, the Hundred Years' War was at an end; 
Calais alone remained to the invaders of all their 
French possessions — Calais, not Normandy, Maine, 
Anjou, Paris, Bordeaux, with that land of wine and 
corn, rich Aquitaine — Calais alone consoled the de- 
feated English, France was now a great power, 
united, strong, no longer an anarchy of isolated atoms, 
but organized into a whole. 

Of all the miracles of Joan of Arc, the greatest was 
that she wrought in the heart of her King. The 
"Gen til Dauphin," the "King of Bourges," the de- 
spondent, decadent prince of Mehun-sur-Yevre, was 
to be a great monarch and the inaugurator of a new 
order of things. When the English burned alive the 
Flower of Chivalry at Rouen, something came to an 
end in France; and something began. We may place 
there, perhaps, the close of the Middle Ages. 

A French historian (Victor Duruy) takes the later 
years of Charles VII to mark the opening of the mod- 







o|d-v.o8 

... ^s. 







DELIVERANCE 97 

em epoch. The France which existed from the time 
of Clovis and Charlemagne had borne many fruits 
and done many a deed. That France had elaborated 
the feudal system, had launched that great enterprise 
of the Crusades, had instituted chivalry and all the 
poetry of knighthood, had invented scholastic theology, 
had built the great Gothic cathedrals; that France is 
now at an end. The France that begins — the consti- 
tuted monarchy — will have perhaps a less touching, 
a less vital, originality, but it possesses an incomparable 
dignity. 

Magnus ab integro sasclorum nascitur ordo. 

This new France, with its organized army, its cen- 
tralized power, its system of taxes, its new conception 
of the State — this France which more and more will 
efface that elder France of chivalry, fiefs, communes, 
provinces — this France which with every successive 
monarch gains something in power and grace, from 
Charles VII to Louis XV — this almost modem France 
is obviously, not only the Elder Daughter of the Church 
(as is her boast), but the heir of the Roman Empire 
in its dangerous tradition of supremacy, of Monarchia. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Marquis de Beaucourt: Histoire de Charles VII. 
Michelet: Histoire de France, t. v. 
J. Quicherat: Proces de Condemnation de Jeanne d'Arc. 
Vallet de Viriville: Histoire de Charles VII. 
Anatole France: Histoire de Jeanne d'Arc. 
Andrew Lang: The Maid of France. 
SiMjfeoN Luce: La France pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans. 
Boucher de Molandon: L'Armee anglaise vainctie par Jeanne 
d'Arc. 



PART III 
THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 



99 



CHAPTER I 

THE RENAISSANCE 

There are seasons in history when the human spirit 
seems to bud and blossom — great inventions, glorious 
discoveries, start into life, and fresh horizons open at 
every turn. Nations have their Aprils when the world 
seems to flower with a fortunate novelty. Such a 
springtime, such an Easter, pervaded all Europe in 
the last half of the fifteenth century. 

Inventions, discoveries, retrievals, and revivals com- 
bined to fill the times with new notions, fresh ideas. 
If Charles VII was able, in so few years, to reorganize 
the whole system of his armies, suppressing the feudal 
companies and communal train bands, inaugurating 
a national army and a State artillery, it was those new 
cannons that had seemed such toys at Crecy, which 
enabled the King to centralize his forces. The bom- 
bards and bullets of the siege of Orleans were already 
powerful engines of battle; a little later the generaliza- 
tion of portable fire-arms favoured the increase of 
regular troops. The knight-errant with his lance, 
the feudal lord, plated from top to toe and followed 
by his men-at-arms, even the terrible archers of Eng- 
land, were vanquished by anticipation, no longer a 
living dread, but a curious survival, powerless in front 
of the heavy artillery of the State. 



102 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

A greater invention than gunpowder did still more 
to inaugurate the modern age. At Mayence on the 
Rhine, in 1456, a printer named Gutenberg, improving 
on the discovery of a Dutch inventor, Laurent Coster, 
of Haarlem, gave to the world, as the resiilt of patient 
experiment, a Bible printed with movable metallic 
type in a new sort of press. 

The printing-press awoke in Europe an enthusiasm 
which we may compare to that which in our own times 
greeted the automobile or the aeroplane. Whole 
families from generation to generation gave themselves 
up to the perfection of the wonderful mechanism. At 
Venice, in 1494, a professor of Greek and Latin founded 
the famous Aldine Press. At Paris, in 1502, a young 
French noble, Henri Estienne, tarnished his ancestral 
shield with a smear of printer's ink and (though his 
father cut him off with a shilling for it) turned trades- 
man, founding that illustrious dynasty of the Estiennes 
which has made his name forever dear to book-lovers. 
It was good in those days to be a printer, for one had 
plenty to print. The fall of Constantinople (taken 
by the Turks in 1453) had dispersed and sent out into 
exile the learned Greeks and Byzantines who still 
continued the tradition of antiquity in the shadow of 
Saint Sophia. They fled for shelter and protection, 
first to Florence, then to France, bringing their sheaves 
with them — sheaves of priceless manuscripts, the 
writings of Plato, of Aristotle, of the great classic 
dramatists. Aristotle had filtered down to modem 
times through the perversions and translations of his 
disciples, the Arab philosophers of Spain, but Plato 
came almost as a revelation. In the end of the fifteenth 
century, one Marsiglio Ficino, of Florence, translated 
into Latin the works of Plato and of Plotinus. It is 



THE RENAISSANCE 103 

impossible to overestimate the influence of this new 
learning on the religious ideal of France. 

This new world of inventions and ideas was doubled 
by a real, a material New World. On the 12th of 
October, 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered, as he 
thought and intended, the eastern coast of Asia; but 
it was America. In that voyage and two others, rapidly 
succeeding, he brought into human ken, and under the 
sway of Spain, a New World, the "West Indies," as 
America was called at first. I have read in a very early 
printed pamphlet (an "incunable, " as we book-lovers 
say) of "the new discovered Land beyond the Ganges"; 
and in fact Christopher Columbus, on sighting land, 
supposed that he had reached the further side of 
India — which is why we still call the indigenous race 
the "Red Indians." 

So great a discovery meant a readjustment of all that 
preceded it; and by its immense increase of Spanish 
wealth and Spanish power, the voyage of Christopher 
Columbus disturbed the balance of power in Europe. 
In the sixteenth century we shall find the- great rival 
and enemy of France to be no longer England, but 
Spain. There is, however, an interlude between the 
rivalry of France and England and the rivalry of France 
and Spain (with the Empire), which interlude was 
occupied by several successive French invasions of 
Italy, expeditions which did but little from the point 
of view of territorial aggrandizement, but which 
exercised the greatest possible influence on the de- 
velopment of art and life in France. 

Italy was in those days the very fount of beauty, 
the reservoir of all that remained of Greece and Rome : 
ideas and relics. And certainly it was not in view of 
completing their education that, for thirty years and 



I04 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

more, from 1493 till 1525, the armies of France streamed 
across the Alps in recurrent floods ; but the diffusion of 
classic culture was after all the chief result of all their 
battles. The France we know would not have been the 
France we know but for those madcap expeditions. 

After a hundred years of waste and carnage, France 
had swung back to the intellectual position which she 
had occupied under Charles the Wise. Then, too, 
Italy, antiquity, had occupied her; then, already, 
Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Seneca were names 
to conjure with; that spirit, half romantic and half 
stoical, which more and more, as times go on, we shall 
associate with what is most characteristically French. 
And then came the Hundred Years' War. 

In fact, those revolutions and wars by which we 
date history are often not landmarks, but obstacles to 
history. Still, as a river sometimes flows underground 
for a portion of its course, emerging undiminished, the 
trend of thought which had taken its rise in the court 
of Charles V was merely lost to sight during the suc- 
ceeding century. That preoccupation with the idea 
of the State, that conception of social unity, the desire 
of a general education and amelioration for 'Tuniversite 
du commun peuple, " all that sense of mind and morals 
and rational progress was not wasted, but was indeed 
the distant, the unapparent impulse which set in 
movement the reforms of Charles VII and his son, 
King Louis. 

To the average English playgoer, Louis XI is a 
personage of a grisly yet comic odiousness, something 
like a French Hunchback-Richard. But to the student 
of history this unamiable individual appears as a great 
king, the precursor of modern royalty: in fact, one of 
the monarchs that France could least have spared. An 



THE RENAISSANCE 105 

ungrateful and rebellious son, a neglectful, indeed a 
cruel husband to that unhappy poetess, Margaret of 
Scotland; a false friend, a treacherous guest, a hypo- 
crite, an egoist, a hypochondriac, and a miser, and 
with no grace of mind or person to carry off and com- 
pensate so many disadvantages (for this great prince 
was, to look at, the merest lout, with shabby clothes 
all wrinkled round his crook-kneed spindle legs, and 
a battered slouch hat throwing a friendly shadow on his 
long, coarse nose), still Louis XI was a person of parts 
and a man of power. He was patient and wise, and 
knew how to diraw the maximum of profit from every 
disagreeable experience. As heir to the throne he had 
been the friend of the feudal nobles, and had raised 
more than one revolt against the centralizing govern- 
ment of his father, Charles VII. But when his time 
came to reign, he turned his coat with a vengeance, 
and so much so that his outraged associates of yesterday 
incensed by his cynical apostasy, banded themselves 
together in an alliance oddly misnamed the League of 
Public Weal; but in the end Louis got the better of 
them all. The Universal Spider spread his web (it is 
the name given him by a Burgundian chronicler: 
"runiverselle araigne"), and in his tangle of wars, 
treaties, matches and marriage contracts, last wills and 
testaments, contracts and bargains, he caught all the 
glittering flies of French feudality and sucked them 
dry. 

And, one by one, he added their possessions to the 
Crown domains. Between 1472 and 1482 he thus 
accumulated Armagnac, Alengon, Nemours, part of 
the great turbulent province of Burgundy, the towns 
on the Somme, Artois, Roussillon, Franche-Comte, 
Anjou, Maine, Provence, and therewith the rights of 



io6 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

the House of Anjou to the throne of Naples. Louis 
XI was the master-builder of French territorial unity. 
Nor did he neglect the wise administration of the king- 
dom that he builded. He instituted three new par- 
liaments, at Grenoble, Bordeaux, and Dijon, which 
brought the King's justice within reach of the people 
and kept in check the local pretensions of the feudal 
lords. He created a central Postal Service: a thing 
that seems so necessary to civilization that we can 
hardly imagine a world without it; but there had been 
none in France since Charlemagne, who had for a 
while revived the Postal Service of the Romans. Louis 
XI, in 1464, established on all the highroads of France, 
at stages of four leagues apart, a series of post-houses 
with relays of four or five swift horses and a postmaster 
in each; but the jealous King reserved the system for 
the royal service. He opened countless roads, canals, 
mines, founded many manufactories, markets, fairs, 
attracting to France the cleverest craftsmen of the 
neighbouring countries; he established a printing-press 
not only in Paris but at Lyons, Caen, Poitiers, Angers ; 
he instituted the provincial universities of Valence, 
Bourges, Caen, and Besangon. In fact, he prepared 
the meagre and convalescent kingdom which he had 
inherited for a great outburst of prosperity and culture ; 
and when, in 1483, he died — always privately execrable 
and publicly execrated — he had lifted France into the 
front rank of nations. 

Louis left behind him two children, a daughter of 
twenty-one, a son of thirteen ; he had a great opinion 
of his girl, and left her Regent of France during the 
minority of her brother. Anne of Beaujeu was a type 
of Frenchwoman who has been frequent in every age, 
managing, masterful, economical, prudent, devoted. 



THE RENAISSANCE 107 

She married her little brother to the heiress of Brittany, 
in the teeth of the bride's opposition. And so, as a 
peasant farmer adds field to field and vineyard to 
vineyard, the father and daughter between them 
compacted the kingdom of France. 

The son was of a different type; men called him 
Charles the Affable. He was the harum-scarum young 
Frenchman we so often meet, ugly, expressive, pleasant, 
friendly, brave, and eager for romance. He had lived 
all his life far from his father's court, reading the Rosier 
des Guerres and countless romances of chivalry, in his 
castle of Amboise. Of all his father's inheritance, that 
which appealed the most to this vivacious yet dreamy, 
unpractical young man was just that one item by which 
the prudent Louis set no store : the claims of the House 
of Anjou to the crown of Naples. In 1494, the King 
(four and twenty years of age) crossed the Alps in a 
tumultuous rush, dragging over the mountains with 
him forty of those new cannon which were as strange 
and terrifying to the Italy of his times as the German 
Zeppelins or the English "Tanks" are to our own. 
What a surprise to the Transalpine princes, accustomed 
to the leisurely, methodical battles of their Condottieri, 
as regular and almost as harmless as a game of chess — ■ 
what a terrible revelation was this mad, destructive 
inrush of the French! They called Charles the Affable 
the "Scourge of Heaven." The invasion of Italy 
appeared even to contemporaries a miracle. The young 
King, ill-advised, without generals, without money, 
leading the impromptu army of a moment's whim, 
traversed hostile Italy as glorious as Charlemagne. 
A horde of young Barbarians they must have seemed! 
We know how the French soldiers shied stones at 
Lionardo's statue of Duke Sforza at Milan and broke 



io8 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

the priceless masterpiece to bits. But if they were 
rough and rude, if the Italian tyrants, who so long had 
coquetted with France, deplored their advent, the 
common people everywhere welcomed the army and 
cried: "Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini!'' The 
women brought their jewels to pay the troops; the 
men threw open the gates of the cities, every difficulty 
was overridden; for, says Comines, touched with the 
grave exaltation of the hour, "God Himself was our 
leader: Dieu monstroit conduire Ventreprise. At our 
first arrival [he goes on] the people honoured us as 
saints, supposing all faith and virtue to be in us; but 
this opinion endured not long. " 

For there reigned a great wickedness in the beautiful 
cities of Italy, and the people took the French for an 
army of deliverers. Let us take not only the testimony 
of the French, but, out of a cloud of witnesses, the 
words of Marin Sanudo, the Venetian Secretary: 
"There is no city in Italy [says he] — not Rome or 
Naples, not MHan, Florence, Bologna or Ferrara, nay, 
not my own Venice even — that is holier than the cities 
of the Plain!" But how beautifiil were Sodom and 
Gomorrah! What angels painted in the chapels of 
Florence, where Savonarola in the pulpit welcomed 
with his fiery eloquence the coming of the French! 
And Milan, with the frescoes of Lionardo fresh upon 
the wall. And Ariosto at Ferrara ! And Venice, where 
the girl Madonnas of Gian Bellini were not yet all 
begun ! And the Pope at Rome was Borgia ! And the 
preacher at Florence was Savonarola ! 

Among all this strange extravagance of beauty, vice, 
and virtue, the King of France moved like a quaint 
elfin child, "A quite uninstructed person [wrote the 
Milanese Corio], though none the less able to address 



THE RENAISSANCE 109 

his soldiery in such telling terms that they rush upon 
the enemy crying, 'Alive or dead!'" And the young 
French lords innumerable who accompanied him, and 
all their soldiery, made a wonderful progress to Naples, 
where Charles was crowned King of Naples, Emperor 
of the East, and King of Jerusalem. The ugly, bright- 
eyed youth projected a Crusade. But a rumour of an 
anti-Gallic League of those very States which had 
welcomed the French so fervently sent Charles and his 
army back across the Alps. That was the first of 
several French invasions of Italy. A few years later 
Charles was to die of an accident at tennis; his cousin 
and successor, Louis XII, remembered his grandmother, 
Valentine of Milan, and led another army into Italy 
in pursuance of the French claim to Milan. And the 
same fantastic claims led his heir, Francis I, more than 
once into Lombardy, where he scored a great victory 
in 1 51 5, and ten years later was taken captive at Pavia. 
The reverses and the successes of France in Italy were 
alike ephemeral. What really mattered, what really 
contributed to the growth of France, was the impression 
of Italy that the French brought away with them: an 
immense enlargement of the moral and artistic faculties 
the one stimulated by the beauty and the science of 
Italy, the other shaken and awakened as by the spec- 
tacle of a shocking example. For the very same great 
lords who bought Lionardo's pictures and Ariosto's 
poems were poisoners, employers of paid assassins, 
adept in unnatural vices. It was borne in upon honest 
France that there is something worth more than all that 
Fairyland can show. As Rabelais wrote, voicing the 
sense of his time in immortal words: ''Science sans con- 
science est la mine de I'dme" — "Knowledge bereft of 
conscience is the ruin of the soul." 



no THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

The thirty years' war which France waged on Italy 
did more for the mind of the nation than the Hundred 
Years' War with England. The English occupied 
France without modifying it. The French kings 
brought back with them personalities of such genius 
that they grafted new conceptions on the stock of 
France. When Francis I invited to Fontainebleau the 
master-painter Lionardo da Vinci — sculptor, architect, 
physicist, engineer, writer, musician; when he turned 
his French manor into a wonderful Italian palace, with 
Andrea del Sarto, Benvenuto Cellini, Primaticcio, for 
its decorators; when he founded the College of France 
and welcomed there the humanists and scholars left 
shelterless by the fall of the Republic of Florence; 
when he married his son to the Pope's niece, Catherine 
dei Medici, the Florentine; when French authors 
translated Petrarch, Tasso, Boccaccio, Macchiavelli 
(the gods of the Italianate court), the invasion of 
France by Italian culture became complete. Those old, 
vain raids on Milan had been after all more important 
than many a successful war, and in a mood of fancy we 
might suppose that the snake uncoiled upon the shield 
of the Visconti had renewed the temptation of the 
primal Serpent. France, at its bidding, like Adam, 
had eaten of the Fruit of the Tree. 

And, as in the earlier Renaissance, this invasion of 
foreign germs produced a marvellous blossoming of 
native genius. This is not the place to write of the 
French Renaissance, but I must at least, in passing by, 
salute two great names. (Could one write of Eliza- 
bethan England and never mention Shakespeare?) 
Rabelais's Life of Gargantua is an orgy of Life, inexpres- 
sibly coarse, and yet full of poetry, a foul and glorious 
paean in praise of the energy of Nature. The French, 



THE RENAISSANCE iii 

who are so fine, so delicate and exquisite, are yet some- 
times coarse with a surprising coarseness : an unexpected 
filth that the English imagination boggles at. But 
Rabelais is their master in this line. Yet so great was 
his love of Life, so deep and hearty his Pagan philo- 
sophy, so ardent his wish to liberate the intelligence of 
man, to enfranchise his instincts and ensure his free- 
dom and his happiness, and so contagious is his rol- 
licking laugh, that, as we shut up the book, we murmur 
to ourselves: "Whom have we here? Is it Falstaff, 
Caliban, or Prospero?" 

Rabelais's story (like Cervantes's Don Quixote) was 
begun as a skit upon an old mediasval novel. The story 
is nothing, the stuff of no importance; the priceless 
value of the work lies in its embroidery : all the rushing, 
gushing, incoherent welter of fun, philosophy, learning, 
wit, imagination, in a magical medley of words. The 
revolt of Nature against Grace, the claims of the body 
as opposed to the soul, the belief in a beauty and a 
harmony immanent in all the natural courses of life, 
the hatred of what he calls "Antiphysie, " and what 
we perhaps might call metaphysics, have never been 
expressed with a more unconquerable conviction. 
Rabelais was a medical student for years before he 
became cure of Meudon, and his genius keeps the 
mark of the sawbones and the apothecary. 

The discursiveness, the scepticism, the egotism of 
Rabelais are present in the other great name of his 
age, Michel de Montaigne, who, feeling he had so 
much to say about life and things, very wisely gave up 
any attempt to tell a story and merely gave us his 
views and meditations, inventing a new form : the Essay. 

Montaigne was a man of free and meditative mind, 
as little trammelled by custom and superstition as 



112 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

Rabelais himself; like Rabelais, something of an 
anarchist, much of an epicurean. But, unlike Rabelais, 
he finds something superior to the beauty and harmony 
of Nature, and that is the mastery a man may gain 
over his own mind and over circumstance and fate: 
in fact, Montaigne, the "soft and slack Montaigne" 
(as Pascal calls him), the loose and lax Montaigne, as 
we are all inclined to think, was, in his deepest heart, 
a Stoic. It is, I think, this mingling of free philo- 
sophy and natural grace with something firm and 
stoical at bottom which makes him so characteristically 
French and (to my humble thinking) one of the most 
delightful authors in the world. But Montaigne has 
always been beloved in England. Owing perhaps to 
the fact (as I think Sir Sydney Lee was the first to 
point out) that Lord Bacon's elder brother settled 
at Bordeaux, was an intimate friend of the French 
philosopher, his works passed early to our English 
thinker's hands, and Montaigne's Essais gave the 
pattern to Bacon's Essays. The marvellous translation 
of John Florio soon rendered the Frenchman almost 
as popular in England as at home; there can be little 
doubt that Shakespeare studied him; and from that 
day to this it is doubtful if any foreign author has had, 
in our studies and among the meditative, solitary sort, 
a more appreciative public than Montaigne. The 
character of the philosopher is akin to our phlegmatic, 
liberal English temper ; he declared himself our ' ' cousin ' ' 
and inclined to think that the original Eyquems of 
Montaigne were immigrants to Bordeaux from our 
isles. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 
Michelet: La Renaissance. 
Marquis de Beaucourt: Histoire de Charles VII. 



THE RENAISSANCE 113 

CoMMiNEs: Memoires. 

Madame Duclaux (Mary Robinson) : The End of the Middle Ages. 
Victor Duruy: Histoire de France, 
CoRio: Storia di Milano. 
Diarii di Marin Sanudo, etc. 
8 



CHAPTER II 

THE WARS OF RELIGION 

France could not continue to linger in the school of 
Italy. All her energies for the next two hundred 
years will be absorbed by her struggle, a real life- 
and-death struggle, with Spain and the Empire. 

The difficulty of understanding the development of 
France during this period is that her foreign policy 
and her home policy are almost constantly contra- 
dictory : she is like one of those machines whose wheels 
turn, some in one direction, some in another; one 
would think it ought to stand stock-still, like two 
rams butting one another; yet the machine works. 
And this difficult period is one of constant growth 
for France. Despite its wars and its catastrophes it 
embraces (in a first act, as it were) the reign of Francis 
I and the reign of Henry Quatre; and then what we 
must call, after Voltaire, the century of Louis XIV. 

In this chapter I shall deal merely with the sixteenth 
century and with that earlier rivalry of France and 
the Empire which came to an end in the triumph of 
France on the accession of Henry IV. But Richelieu, 
Mazarin, and Louis Quatorze will still have three long 
lives to spend in stamping out the ashes of those ill- 
extinguished fires. Indeed, from early in the sixteenth 
century till the beginning of the eighteenth, the great 

114 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 115 

affair, not only of France but of Europe, was: Which 
shall be the leader, France or the Empire ? 

The Empire was of course the Empire of Germany 
— the "Holy Roman Empire of Germanic Nationality" 
— much less German than Austrian, for although nomi- 
nally elective, the Empire was in fact, for many 
hundreds of years, a fief, as it were, of the House of 
Hapsburg. When, in 15 19, the Emperor Maximilian 
died, his grandson and natural heir was Charles V, the 
youthful King of Spain. 

But the Empire was still supposed to be elective, 
and, in fact, a form of election was regularly gone 
through, candidates presenting themselves with a great 
flourish of credentials, and (though the farce always 
ended in the choice of a Hapsburg) the election of an 
Austrian was not absolutely a foregone conclusion. 
And the election of a King of Spain to a throne which 
already controlled both Germany and Austria, Lorraine 
and the Netherlands, Flanders and Alsace, with claims 
to Milan, Naples, Navarre, and Burgundy — such an 
overwhelming preponderance accorded to one royal 
House would so evidently upset the balance of power 
in Europe that the election of 1519 promised at last to 
be serious. 

Three kings presented themselves, all young, the 
first of their rank in the world, for the consideration 
of the seven princely Electors. They were Henry VHI 
of England, Francis I of France, Charles V of Spain. 
And the German princes chose Charles of Spain, the 
Hapsburg. 

Now let us open a map and see how the possessions 
of this new Emperor surround and stifle France. To 
the east, from the Channel to the Alps, reach the 
Netherlands, Flanders, Franche-Comte, Lorraine, Al- 



ii6 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

sace (all Charles's), with at the back of them the Ger- 
man Empire; he contests the Italian frontier; on the 
south-west he owns Spain; and, in right of his grand- 
mother, he is a claimant to Burgundy, Artois, and 
Flanders. 

France lay in his grip! Let us suppose that in the 
present age, by some strange chance, an Emperor of 
Russia, already King of Poland, with rights and pre- 
tensions to the crown of Italy, should be elected Presi- 
dent of the French Republic and King of Belgium. 
Even so, the Central Empires of 19 17 would not be 
as closely surrounded by their arch-enemy as sixteenth 
century France was by the heir of the Hapsburgs. 

This one glance at a map explains all the foreign 
policy of France, compelled to intrigue with the Turk 
(that arch-enemy of Austria), to coquet with England, 
to approach the Protestant princes of Germany — in 
fact, to invent and elaborate a great Liberal League in 
order to counterbalance the immense orthodox forces 
of Austria, Spain, and the Empire. The friends of 
France abroad are the Turk, the heretic, and the infidel. 
And yet France is a great Catholic power, distraught 
with her own heresies, a house divided against 
herself. 

In the middle of the sixteenth century at least one- 
fifth of France was Protestant; in some provinces far 
more; one-half of Burgundy and three parts of Beam; 
and the effort of the French kings was to reduce these 
Protestants by every form of battle, murder, and 
sudden death: to exterminate these heretic subjects, 
who were, in France, almost a separate Republic, a 
State within the State, and yet who were of the same 
religion as the foreign allies of France. The very 
sovereign who negotiates an alliance with Henry VIII or 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 117 

Queen Elizabeth, or a treaty with the Lutheran princes 
across the Rhine, is, in his own country, the enemy 
in arms of the upholders of the Chiurch of his allies. 
The situation appears inextricable, unless we remember 
that what we call the wars of religion were in fact 
political wars. 

The monarchy had grown very strong in France 
under Louis XI, very splendid under Francis I; and 
also, by reason of the frequent invasions of Italy and 
the constant infiltration into France of Italian culture, 
the monarchy had grown Italianate. The son of King 
Francis married a Florentine, and, for fifty years, at 
the court of Catherine dei Medici, Italian culture 
reigned. Gradually around her there was formed a sort 
of Italian kernel to the court: an inner council from 
beyond the Alps. There was Gondi, the Florentine, 
who became Due de Retz; there was the Milanese 
Birago, the magistrate who became Chancellor of 
France; there was also Strozzi, the Queen's cousin, 
ready to conduct her armies; and Gonzaga, son of the 
Duke of Mantua, who by his marriage became the 
French Due de Nevers. All these and many more 
were the ardent adepts of the absolute Italian theory of 
government. 

Macchiavelli was their great man; we know that 
Catherine's son, Henry, listened every night to a 
chapter of the Prince read aloud to him ere he slept, as 
good Huguenots listened to a chapter of the Scriptures ; 
and doubtless his mother was no less well informed. 
Not only in the great Florentine, but in all their Ital- 
ianate jurists and legists, they found material to nourish 
their conception of a king. It was the old Roman 
conception of the monarch as the supreme, almost 
divine expression of the State: the king can do no 



ii8 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

wrong; his will is law; he is the soul of his people and 
they exist to serve him. None shall worship at another 
altar than the king's nor think any private or public 
duty so sacred as his good pleasure. No property of 
any individual, no privilege of any province, no liberty 
of any city, had any rights or sanction save His Majes- 
ty's consent. Against his express command, his sub- 
jects could have no defence and no redress. Such 
theorists saw little difference between a heretic and a 
rebel. 

And in truth a Huguenot was often, if not a rebel, at 
least a Constitutionalist. There is a deep Republican 
instinct in the soul of Protestantism. At least, for the 
most part the Huguenots held that, if the monarchy 
degenerate into a tyranny, it is the duty of subjects not 
to submit, but to warn their sovereign of his excess 
and to correct the error of his ways. Like Milon de 
Dormans, two hundred years before them, they said: 
"The king reigns not by a right divine, but by the 
suffrage of his people." If we wish to see their point 
of view, let us open the books of their poet and leader, 
Agrippa d'Aubigne (his Tragiques, at any rate, may, I 
believe, be bought for a very small price) ; at every 
page of his Memoirs we shall find some weighty 
sentence : 

II y a una foi obligatoire entre le roi et ses sujets. . . . 
Le prince que rompt la foi k son peuple rompt celle de 
son peuple. . . . 

La puissance du prince procede du peuple. 

(The king and his subjects owe a duty to each other. . . . 
The prince who breaks his faith to the people forfeits 
thereby his right to their allegiance. . . . 

The power of the prince proceeds from the people.) 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 119 

Thus Aubigne and the Huguenots opposed to 
Macchiavelli the old Gallican theory of monarchy, 
indigenous to the soil. In the ears of Catherine dei 
Medici's Italianate council it rang with the sound of 
treason, and, in perfect good faith, autocratic Catholics 
and democratic Huguenots massacred each other as 
debasers of the moral currency of the State. 

I do not deny that the Huguenot gentlemen who 
swung from the balconies of the castle at Amboise 
were martyrs to their faith; but they died chiefly 
because they had failed in their attempt to kidnap the 
young King. It was a plan that Coligny avowed. 
And other Huguenots would calmly have taken the 
crown from the Valois to place it on the brows of another 
Bourbon, their leader, the Prince of Conde, for whom 
they struck a medal with this inscription: ''Roi des 
Fideles": "King of the Faithful." 

Not only were the Protestants naturally Republican, 
or at least Constitutionalist — not only did they profess 
(as Jurieu, their jurisconsult was soon to formulate it) 
"que le peuple est le premier souverain; et que la 
souverainete y demeure toujours, non seulement comme 
dans sa source mais encore comme dans son premier 
sujet' ' ; in addition to this inherent instinctof democracy, 
we must not forget the suspicion which attached to 
the Protestants on account of their supposed affiliation 
to the Anabaptists of the Low Countries. So, in our 
own times, in a country under autocratic government, 
a Liberal movement might, by a not unnatural con- 
fusion, be suspected of Nihilist tendencies, and per- 
secuted on that account. In perfect honesty on either 
side, a civil war, in fact as political as our war of the 
Cavaliers and the Roundheads, devastated France for 
more than thirty years, usurping the name and the 



120 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

principles of religion. The horrors of the Hundred 
Years' War were renewed : 

O France desolee ! O France sanguinaire, 
Non pas terre, mais cendre! 

writes Agrippa d'Aubigne in his Tragiques. And he 
records how he saw in a vision his country, France, 
bearing in her arms two twin brothers, who fight like 
deadly foes and lacerate their nursing mother's breasts, 
spilling her kind milk, tearing her tender flesh, until 
the anguished martyr cries : 

Je n'ai plus que de sang pour votre nourriture! 
(I have no milk to give you, only blood!) 

Yet there were those in France who deplored the 
struggle that knit the sons of France in so deadly a 
grip; Catholics like Ronsard, who bewailed the stains 
and smirches on his crucifix: 

Un Christ empistole, tout noirci de fumee; 

Protestants like Henry of Navarre, who fought for 
their faith and yet held that the fairest of victories was 
for brethren to dwell together in amity. There was a 
Montaigne, with his wise and meditative mind. There 
was a Michel de I'Hopital, who denounced civil war as 
wicked and unnatural. Nay, the very Queen-Mother 
herself, Catherine dei Medici, aspired to peace and 
harmony. In 1570 the reign of concord seemed at hand. 
The struggle with Spain was acute, and naturally 
sent the French Government to the further swing 
of the pendulum — towards England and Holland; 
there were great negotiations for marrying one of 
Queen Catherine's sons to Elizabeth of England; the 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 121 

young King, Charles IX, took for his mentor the 
Protestant chief, the Admiral de Coligny; and Cathe- 
rine married her daughter to Henry of Navarre, the 
Prince of the Huguenots, who, after her own three 
sons, stood next in succession to the throne of France. 

Pope's niece though she was, Catherine was no 
bigoted Catholic, no martyr for her religion, like Mary 
Queen of Scots, She was an unfanatical Italian; 
doubtless, like that other Italian, Caesar, she thought 
these Gauls too much addicted to religion; and cer- 
tainly she deplored the appalling waste and ravage 
of her children's property, the kingdom of France. 
These ruined provinces no longer paid their expenses: 
the Queen had, if I may say so, household cares. The 
annual cost of the kingdom was seventeen millions 
and the incomings not quite three! Doubtless, if by 
raising a finger Catherine could have delivered the 
country from Catholics and Protestants alike, that 
finger would have been raised. 

She sought at least to play the two parties one 
against the other, leaning now to this side, now to that, 
in an impossible attempt at equilibrium. But the 
violence of the times was too great: she could be sure 
of neither party. In August, 1572, when most she 
appeared to incline to the Huguenot faction (at that 
time assembled in Paris to celebrate the marriage of 
their prince with the young King's sister), she seems 
to have been suddenly startled by some rumour of a 
Protestant plot to capture the King, and trembled 
anew, demoralized by terror. 

At that moment, I imagine, she must have cast her 
eyes on the book that was the political Bible of the 
Medici: Macchiavelli's Prince. Or did she need to 
open it, knowing it so well by heart? Therein she 



122 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

could read the danger of such a system as that which 
she had recently applied — the perpetual shilly-shally 
between irreconcilable interests. . . . The doctrine of 
Macchiavelli is not unlike that which has inspired the 
Kaiser in the war of 19 14-18 — it is the apology for 
absolute power, the right of a king to exercise cruelty 
in order to enforce obedience: in fact, the theory of 
"frightfulness. " It is a theory which has a certain 
unholy fascination in print. But, when applied . . . 
Well, we remember the effect on Europe of the Ger- 
man ravages in Belgium. . . . Catherine, too, was 
doubtless taken aback by the result of her recipe for 
good government, when no longer meditated in the 
study but put in practice on flesh and blood. 

Macchiavelli maintains that cruelty is legitimate on 
the part of a prince if it be employed in the interests 
of order and only once, in a single stroke, by a coup 
d'etat, intended to secure the direction of affairs. The 
blow must fall sudden and dreadful, must teach by 
terror, vanquish by victory, and never need to be 
repeated . . . and it must be succeeded by a long 
and mild sequence of public benefits, which follow 
after the thunderstroke like the gentle, fertilizing 
rain. . . . 

It is, as I say, the policy of the Germans in the 
invaded provinces of Belgium and France. In our 
father's time it was the policy of Napoleon III. And 
a modern writer has been found to advocate this 
"operation de police un peu rude.'" But no man, not 
even the Kaiser, ever applied it so thoroughly as that 
trembling mother, that weak woman, Catherine dei 
Medici. 

Her utter devotion to her sons gave her a great 
influence over them, and her terror made her eloquent. 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 123 

She persuaded her half -mad poet of a son, the King 
— Charles IX — that his friend Colignj?- had a plot 
against him (and, indeed, who knows? that may have 
been true, for had not Coligny plotted to kidnap the 
King's elder brother, Francis II, the husband of Mary 
Queen of Scots?), and then, out of fear, and falsehood, 
and a woman's mad impulsiveness, the appalling order 
was given to massacre the Admiral and his six hundred 
gentlemen and their servants and followers (some two 
thousand people in all), and as many more as might 
be of the Protestant professors, doctors, tradespeople 
and mechanics, at that moment more than usually at 
their ease in Paris, on account of their Prince's wed- 
ding and of the new friendship between Coligny and 
the young King. . . . 

That unimaginable crime was ordered and executed 
. . . more or less, for — though some twenty thousand 
were slain in Paris and the other towns of France — yet 
many escaped, and among them Henry of Navarre, 
the future Henry IV, the future idol of the French 
nation. The massacre was applauded by the King of 
Spain (the national enemy), and almost accepted by the 
Queen of England, who protested, it is true, yet stood 
godmother in the following year to a French royal 
babe, and resumed her negotiations for a possible 
marriage with a French royal prince, who was to turn 
Protestant before his wedding and bring with him 
(wrested from Spain) the Low Countries as a dowry 
into England. 

The Inquisition struck a medal of the St. Bartholo- 
mew to commemorate the great and glorious event. 
And the Huguenots, naturally, seeing the construction 
to be placed on peace, broke out again in war. And 
the King died within two years, of sheer horror and 



124 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

nervous collapse, muttering to his old nurse — his old 
Huguenot nurse : ' ' Blood ! Blood ! Que de sang I ' ' But 
on the whole, when we peruse the documents of the 
time we are astonished rather at the slight effect of an 
event which has never since ceased to thrill the world 
with horror and loathing — which has injured so de- 
sperately the fair fame of France and left so deep a mark 
in history. I suppose if you were to ask the man in the 
street what he remembers of French history, he would 
reply: "Joan of Arc, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
Versailles, the French Revolution, and Napoleon." 

Yet this capital event brought about no great result, 
unless it were to sicken the country with civil war. 
No country can go mad for more than a certain time. 
A dozen years of battle had ruined France. Thou- 
sands of villages were reduced to ashes; the grass grew 
over the rutted, disused roads; the two broken halves 
of the fractured bridges appeared to lift up their arms 
to heaven in protest. And the streets were full of the 
halt, the maimed, and the poor, who begged their 
bread from door to door and slept among the tombs 
in the cemeteries. 

The end was not yet — and not for many years; but 
already, between the two extremes of public passion, 
a new party grew and increased: the Moderates, the 
"Politiques." Did not the wise Montaigne affirm 
to the historian, de Thou, that Henry of Navarre was 
no Protestant and Guise no Catholic? The time came 
at last when it was for France a question of Peace or 
Death; when both the King (Henry HI) and his heir, 
the King of Navarre, were bent on peace; and yet 
the land, distraught by too many rancours, could not 
settle down in quiet, but went maddening on in its 
insensate vendettas. 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 125 

And then a strange thing took place: the Catholic 
party — the party of absolute monarchy — forsook the 
King. Henry III had no direct heir; his successor 
in law would be Henry of Navarre, the "murdering 
Protestant" as they would say in Ireland. And in 
view of so dire a consequence the Ultra-Catholics 
formed themselves into a League. From 1586 to 
1596, France was really governed (inasmuch as it was 
governed at all) in the North and in the big towns by 
this League, and, in the Federalist, "Home-Ruler" 
South and West, by the organization of the Protestant 
"Cause." France seemed in danger of separating in 
twain. 

The doctrines of the League out-Huguenoted the 
Huguenots by their political audacity. The Leaguers 
wrote to the Pope: "We are jealous of the honour of 
God and of the antique glory of France. We are bom 
Frenchmen, not slaves. Catholics, not Calvinists. " 
And (just as passionately as Agrippa d'Aubigne) they 
argued that the King was only King, ''en vertu du 
consentement de tous." They maintained that there 
exists a tacit contract between the sovereign and the 
nation — a pact which at any moment may be revised. 
And (just as the Protestants struck a medal for Conde 
with the inscription "Roi des Fideles^') so the Leaguers 
offered the crown to another Prince of the royal race, 
that Duke of Guise who had organized the massacre 
of St. Bartholomew, and, after his assassination, 
proposed to seat in his stead on the throne of France 
a daughter of the King of Spain. 

So deep in the mind of France abides the conception 
that kings only reign by virtue of the will of the people. 

What woiild have happened if France had then 
abandoned the principle of an hereditary monarchy? 



126 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

Would France have become a dependance of Spain? 
The charm, the prestige, the natural authority and 
grace, the timely conversion of Henry of Navarre 
saved the situation. France may well idolize the 
memory of Henri Quatre! He brought into that 
Bedlam of senseless strife such a breath of good sense, 
gaiety, courage, stoical endurance, love of realities and 
happy moderation, as showed France in a vision her 
own true image, and chased the fanatics and the 
phantoms afar. It seems strange indeed that this 
most human and most humane of princes should have 
been the cousin and the contemporary of those morbid, 
half-mad, ghastly sons of Catherine dei Medici and 
great-great-grandsons of Valentine Visconti. The King 
of Navarre — gay, prudent, economical, brave, practical, 
alert — seems separated from them by a gulf of cen- 
turies; seems, in fact, a Frenchman of to-day. His 
book of devotion was not Macchiavelli's Prince, but 
a manual of country life and rural economy: the 
Thedtre dAgricuUure of Olivier de Serres; every day 
he listened to it for half an hour. We know his wish 
— the wish of a poor man who had often gone hungry 
— that every farmer in France should have a fowl in 
his pot o' Sundays. He loved the land, and he loved 
the common people, and would have said, as Sully, his 
friend and minister, said: "The pastures and the 
ploughland are the two breasts of the State." "No 
landscape in the world," said he again, "is so fine a 
piece of scenery as a field of corn at harvest time, ripe 
for the cutting." 

Essentially realistic, Henry IV put the substantial 
facts of this world before whatever charter or map his 
fancy and his faith had drawn of the invisible sphere 
beyond. When he found that, as a Protestant, he 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 127 

Cotild not, despite his claims and titles and his right 
divine, make himself acceptable to the majority of his 
subjects, he did as Clovis had done long before: he 
entered the Church of his people. "Paris is worth 
a Mass!" he said — ''Paris vaut Hen une messe!'' But 
he did not forget the old faith in adopting the new. 
He showed himself the grandson of the tolerant, 
gracious, free-minded Margaret of Angoul^me. By 
the Edict of Nantes, if he proclaimed the supremacy 
of the Catholic Church, he secured the liberties and 
rights of Protestants. Henceforth the disabilities of 
dissenters were removed and they were admitted to 
all the charges of the State; was not Sully himself a 
Huguenot? There was a sort of Home Rule for Pro- 
testants; they had their seats in Parliament, their 
towns and castles governed by their own principles. 
And, wearied out, ruined, devastated by thirty years 
of civil war, the nation accepted peace. Henry IV 
had only now to conquer Spain. 

There too he was successful. The Spaniards, allied 
with the Ultra-Catholics of France (the League), had 
sought to wrest the crown from Henry and to place 
on the throne of France a Spanish princess. But (just 
ten years after the defeat of the Armada and our own 
English triumph, and in the very year of the Edict of 
Nantes, which established peace in France) the French 
King, victorious over all his enemies, forced the Span- 
iards to sign the Peace of Vervins, and terminated, by a 
transaction in which France had distinctly the ad- 
vantage, a rivalry that had lasted eighty years. In 
the age-long duel between France and the House of 
Austria, this is the end of the first act ; the principle of 
absolute authority, the reign of Rome, the domination 
of the Inquisition, restrained and controlled in France 



128 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

and England alike, seemed henceforth relegated to the 
Central Empire. In France, England, Holland, in 
Scandinavia, and in the Lutheran States of Germany, 
freedom should reign. Henri Quatre had the vision 
of a confederation of fortunate States united in amity; 
balancing Spain, Austria, and the Empire, those great 
reservoirs of absolutism, by the prosperity of their 
trading democracy. He imagined the United States 
of Europe. 

And this, perhaps, was his most striking originality. 
Nations in those days were goods and chattels; they 
were given with a daughter's dowry, bequeathed to a 
son with his inheritance. It seemed quite just and 
fair that France should ask for Navarre and Milan, 
England make good her rights to Aquitaine, Spain 
rule in Belgium, Austria in Burgundy. Henry first 
saw the life of peoples with an unprejudiced eye; this 
child of Nature discerned the full iniquity of the claims 
of kings. His new project was to respect nationalities. 
He said: 

"Let the Spanish-speaking countries belong to the 
Spaniards; the Germans to the Germans; but I want 
all the French!" 

And he cast a longing eye over Lorraine, Savoy, 
Franche-Comte — which ought to have been his, 
evidently .... 

No hegemony, whether of Austria or of another! 
No universal tyrant, but a society of nations: such was 
the dream of Henri Quatre. And had he lived the 
thing might have come to pass; so great was the force 
of attraction that radiated from a King whose good 
sense was almost genius, whose cordial kindness was 
little less than charity. He hoped to force the Austrian 
to evacuate the Netherlands, forming in his stead a 



TBE WARS OF RELIGION 12c) 

Republic of the Low Countries. He planned another 
Commonwealth in Switzerland, a third in Venice; 
Genoa and Tuscany should fuse in a fourth. These 
four democracies should be balanced by five hereditary 
kingdoms: France, England, Spain, Sweden, and 
Lombardy. And there should be sik elective sover- 
eignties: the Empire, the Papacy, Denmark, and the 
frontier States of Hungary, Poland, Bohemia — Europe's 
bulwark against the Turk. 

Meanwhile, in a few years he restored the finances 
of France and her well-being. The roads were rebuilt 
and planted with trees (even now the fine old centenary 
elms are called ''des Sully'' in memory of Henry's 
minister). He established mills and works and fur- 
naces, for the manufacture of glass, carpets, cloth, 
and especially silk. If the silk trade of France brings 
in to-day some four hundred millions of francs in the 
year, it is a legacy of the brave, gay, practical monarch, 
so besotted with the welfare of his people that he 
planted even his gardens of the Tuileries with mulberry- 
trees for the silkworms, and gave up a part of his 
palace of the Louvre as a permanent Exhibition, or 
Palace of Industry, in which to show the latest inven- 
tions and machines, with lodgings for such artisans 
as should come from the provinces to show their 
models. 

He built the Place Royale (to-day, the Place des 
Vosges), whose porticoes were originally destined to 
exhibit a permanent show of silken manufactured goods. 
He built the tapestry mills of the Gobelins. He built 
the Pont-Neuf , where his statue still stands, and all the 
streets of the Marais, and the Place Dauphine, and how 
much else of the Paris we admire! 

And he was scheming and building the foreign 



130 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

prosperity and peace of France when the dagger of a 
mad fanatic, one Ravaillac, crazed by the sermons of 
embittered priests, cut short the King's career. Total 
eclipse of all the schemes and projects of that brilliant 
reign! The heir to the throne (Louis XIII) was eight 
years old; the Queen-Regent another Medici, and 
without the brains of Catherine; her minister a priest 
him whom we know as Cardinal de Richelieu. 

France turned her coat, left the paths of pleasantness 
and peace, left off farming and spinning, began fighting 
again, and indeed to some extent renewed her civil 
wars. France was no longer democratic nor Liberal. 
Yet, so imperious are the needs of a political situation 
(which indeed is often the result of a geographical 
situation) that her aim, no less in the seventeenth than 
in the sixteenth century, will be the abasement of the 
House of Hapsburg, the limiting and lopping of the 
Empire, and above all the struggle with Spain. Riche- 
lieu and Louis Quatorze, Absolutists and Ultra- 
Catholics, will pursue this task no less perseveringly 
and no less arduously than Henri Quatre; if not by 
the same paths, they tend to the same goal. And that 
goal they attain! France will be covered with ruins 
(having paid in war loans and taxes and indemnities, 
over and over again, more than she possessed)'. But 
France, ragged, mutilated, will at any rate rise from 
the struggle triumphant: her foe breathes no more! 
Considered as a political entity, Spain thenceforth is 
dead and France the leader of the world. 



SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Hardouin de P6refixe: Histoire de Henri le Grand. 
Michelet: La Reforme. 
Lavisse: Histoire de France: Cours moyen. 
Jacques Bainville: Histoire de Deux Peuples. 



THE WARS OF RELIGION 131 

Gabriel Hanotaux: La France en 1614. 
Gust AVE Fagniez: Le Pert Joseph et Richelieu. 
Agrippa d'Aubign^: Les Tragiques. 
Macchiavelli: The Prince. 
Samuel Rocheblave: Agrippa d'Aubigni. 
Madame Duclaux : La Peine de Navarre. 



CHAPTER III 

THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 

The murder of Henry IV appeared at first to secure 
the triumph of Austria and of Spain. His widow, the 
Queen-Regent, as an ItaHan, was naturally subject 
to the influence of the Italians, so plentiful at court: 
her foster-sister, Eleonora Galigai, Concino Concini 
(Marechal d'Ancre), and Gonzaga (Due de Nevers). 

Although she at first protested her resolve to carry 
on her husband's policy, her sympathies ran in an 
opposite direction. The Florentine banker's daughter 
was not bold enough to daunt the German Emperor 
and the Hapsburg King, and the pious Catholic was 
timidly anxious as to the spiritual welfare of a sovereign 
whose allies were Lutherans and heretics. 

Therefore, despite her fair words to Sully, Marie 
dei Medici soon veered her ship; in 1611 Sully was 
sent from the helm. The Queen broached anew an 
old project, which her husband had rejected, of marry- 
ing her son, Louis XIII (nine years old), to a Hapsburg 
princess and giving her daughter to the heir of Spain. 
At the same time she promised no longer to harass the 
House of Austria, ''dene plus trouhler les princes Autri- 
chiens dans les affaires d'Allemagne." 

Meanwhile, in France the great feudal lords broke 
out in revolt against the feeble sovereign, who soon 

132 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 133 

made peace, or rather bought it, paying out by the 
million those gold coins which the economical Henry 
had stored in the Bastille. The States-General were 
summoned to debate and decide the affairs of the 
kingdom. This was in May, 1614, the last month of 
liberty; they will not meet again imtil 1789. 

The most memorable result of their convocation was 
the bringing into note of a promising young prelate who 
will make for himself a name outside the Church. This 
was Armand Duplessis de Richelieu, Bishop of Lugon. 
The assassination of Concini soon left him sole in power. 

At first blush, Richelieu appeared eminently a man 
of the Queen's party: the future Cardinal was not 
only a prelate, but a believer; he was a partisan of 
Concini; he appeared the champion of the Church. 
And no doubt he lent himself rather freely to this 
interpretation, partly because his private and personal 
convictions were not unlike those of the zealots, and 
also because he was anxious to secure the support of 
the majority. But his sole aim was the grandeur of 
his country, by whatever means that best might be 
attained. And he was soon convinced that the ad- 
vantage of France lay, abroad, in the humiliation of 
the Catholic Powers and, at home, in reducing the 
Protestants to the common measure of the kingdom. 
They possessed in the West, at La Rochelle, a sort of 
metropolis which served as centre to what was virtu- 
ally a Huguenot Republic — a State within the State 
(much as a Protestant Ulster might be, safeguarded 
from the Home-Rule of a Catholic Ireland) — an idea 
nowise distasteful to our modern minds, nor, indeed, 
to the federative principles inherent in the West and 
South of France; but abominable in the sight of that 
down-right absolutist and unitarian, Richelieu. 



134 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

So he laid siege to the Protestant capital and de- 
molished La Rochelle: the Huguenots had to surrender 
their free towns, though they were permitted to enjoy 
their religion. And then, having scotched the Pro- 
testant at home, Richelieu steered his ship towards 
the Protestant abroad: renewed the entente with the 
Lutheran princes of Germany, with the Scandinavian 
courts, and bestowed in marriage — not on the Spanish 
Infant, but on the Prince of Wales — the King's sister, 
that young daughter of Henri Quatre and Marie dei 
Medici, Henriette-Marie, whom we English know as 
Henrietta Maria, mournfully predestined to return one 
day to France and seek at Saint-Germain an austere 
and tragic refuge, as the widow of King Charles I. 

Thus having parried, as he thought, a possible 
danger from Protestant federalists at home or Catholic 
imperialists abroad — having squared both the Reform 
and the House of Austria — Richelieu turned his mind 
to the administration of the kingdom. The provinces 
were each in the charge of a royal Governor, a sort of 
Viceroy, with great local powers and prestige; these 
Governors, chosen from the feudal nobles, were a 
danger to the crown. Richelieu set some one to 
watch these guardians, to control these controllers: 
he established a system of Intendants — (shall we say 
Prefects, or Pro-Consuls?), generally, of boiu-geois 
origin, who transmitted the King's orders, surveyed 
their execution, informed his ministers as to local 
interests, and generally secured both the obedience of 
the provincial authorities and the centralization of 
affairs. 

Thus in all directions he prepared the glories of the 
succeeding reign — ay! even in letters, for Richelieu 
was himself a writer (thought himself, indeed, the 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 135 

peer of Comeille) and founded the French Academy. 
The reign of Richelieu was the foreshadowing of the 
reign of Louis Quatorze. I say the reign of RicheHeu, 
for the dull, grave, pious Louis XIII had, as a king, 
this one great merit that, recognizing in his minister 
a man of genius, he left affairs entirely in his hands. 
They reigned, then, together for eighteen years, and 
in 1643 they died, within a few weeks of each other, 
leaving France to a monarch — Louis XIV — four 
years old. 

In 1626, Richelieu, then at the height of his power, 
told Louis XIII that, in a short while, he hoped to 
re-establish France in the prosperity and peace which 
she had enjoyed under his predecessor. Mills and 
works and shops should again enrich the towns, the 
fields should flourish, religion unite men and not divide 
them, the poor should no longer stagger under the 
burden of tax and war loan. So said the great man, 
meaning all he said. But no man, however great, 
can reach at the same time two goals placed in oppo- 
site directions. Richelieu had turned his back on the 
France of Henry IV; he was leading the way to the 
France of Louis Quatorze. 

Farewell, then, that silk-weaving, farming, tolerant 
France — that Liberal and, in some degree, self-govern- 
ing France — of which, between 1590 and 16 10, we 
have enjoyed too brief a vision ! It was a France akin 
to England and to Holland, happy, wealthy, free, but 
soon abandoned for an ideal of splendid unity and 
military glory and a theory of Catholic supremacy 
and centralized, absolute power. If we might at will 
turn back the course of History, would we? . . . 
The reign of Louis XIV was, in its way, one of the great 
magnificences of the world, the crown and glory of its 



136 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

century — the Golden Age, the Classic Period, when 
France in its ftdl effulgence radiates a grandeur and a 
glory that no State has known since the splendours of 
antiquity. 

Sad, that the two ideals should apparently exclude 
each other! That we cannot walk in the paths of 
pleasantness and peace, plan that great concert of the 
United States of Europe, live sparely, dream greatly, 
and frame the common happiness of all (as was the aim 
of Henry IV), while at the same time floating our 
flags over conquered provinces, stamping our image 
on all time in an ineffaceable impression of grandeur 
and authority, elaborating an elite of warriors, poets, 
sages, and orators, whose glory appears rather to re- 
flect than to add to the supreme effulgence of the 
throne, while the Sun-King, himself, seems an emana- 
tion of the Divine radiance, a symbol of Deity, a 
visible sacrament, superior to all the laws and orders 
of our mortal sphere. 

France, which had flung herself exhausted at the 
feet of Henry IV, glittered and flashed like a flaming 
sword in the grasp of his grandson. At first the King 
profited by the accumulations of his economical grand- 
father, and by the long and wise administration of 
Richelieu; the France of Richelieu, indeed, handed 
Louis his sword, just as France of the Revolution 
forged the sword of Napoleon. But Louis was a 
reckless spender. His peace no less costly than his 
wars. His balls and his palaces ran to as much as 
his battles. The King's great enterprises were a 
ruinous expense. 

So many wars and so much glory, a camp full of 
heroes, a court full of poets, a Church full of orators, 
among the greatest the world has known; with on 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 137 

all hands such marvellous fairy palaces: Fontaine- 
bleau, Vaux, Versailles, a score scarce less splendid; 
and the exquisite politeness and mastery ,of daily life 
which make the least vestige of those days: the pri- 
vate letters, the Memoirs, even the State Papers, im- 
mortal and precious as relics of an unrivalled culture 
— all this leaves the impression of a France superior 
to the daily round and common task of humanity. 
But look below the surface. On the surface is that 
exquisite, shining veneer; now, there may be much 
virtue in a veneer — musicians say that the tone and 
quality of a violin are entirely regulated by the nature 
of its varnish, and, as tone and quality, the age of 
Louis XIV was admirable — but underneath that bril- 
liant polish the very substance of which the instru- 
ment was made appeared in danger. The wood had 
got the dry rot. 

Under Henry IV, King and peasant were friends; 
the King entirely without splendour, a brisk, shabby, 
gifted little man, who had known what it was to go 
hungry for lack of a dinner; the farmer happy in his 
new-found prosperity, which he owed to the King. 
Their interests were the same. But what could bring 
together the Sun-King in his glory and the starved, 
brutish tillers of the soil, those sun-blackened human 
cattle whose portrait La Bruyere had drawn immor- 
tally? Not in Russia, not in Ireland, can we see aught 
so poor as the peasant's miserable mud-hovel; his 
clothes are rags; for, wretched as he is, fear and ava- 
rice make him seem more wretched still, lest my lord's 
land-agent, suspecting some secret hoard, should add 
to the rent and redevances that the farmer has to pay. 
He is ignorant as the ox in his plough, and the chances 
are ten to one that he knows scarce a word of that 



138 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

fine French language they speak and write so well at 
court ; very few words, and those in a country dialect, 
are sufficient for his needs. 

These poor serfs, or rather subjects, supported the 
chief burden of the State ; for the nobles and the clergy 
paid neither taxes, rates, loans, subsidies, nor sub- 
vention of any sort or kind. The King was con- 
stantly adding to the list of these fortunate exempt 
ones, so that the swarm of nobles was immense. And 
the burden of the State was very heavy on those who 
bore it unhelped. On account of the court. On 
account of the wars. The wars are splendid and 
successftil. France frees the Low Countries from the 
yoke of Spain; adds town after town, province after 
province, to her own possessions; snatches from the 
Empire Lille, Metz, Toul, Verdun, Alsace, Franche- 
Comte, Flanders, Artois; becomes the uncontested 
leader of Europe. But all these wars take men, take 
money, and some one must pay the bill. Hodge 
(in France we call him Jacques) paid the bill. 

It must not be supposed that the magic of glory, 
the enchantment of a great art, blinded all the eyes 
in France to the dangers of the over splendid and 
over centralized monarchy. There was throughout 
the reign a constant undercurrent of opposition, and 
at the very beginning of it, before the King acquired 
his full prestige, there had occurred a real revolution, 
a something very like our Long Parliament. It was 
called the Fronde. ... 

The weak point of a hereditary monarchy is the risk 
of a Regency. The history of France is full of stormy 
Regencies. If once or twice the Regent proved wiser 
than the monarch (as when Charles V ruled for his 
father, Jean-le-Bon, or Anne de Beaujeu for her 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 139 

brother, Charles VIII), still as an axiom we may say 
that a Regency is the triumph of Misrule. France 
had experienced the truth of the saying in the Regen- 
cies for Charles VII; in the long domination of the 
Queen-Mother, Catherine dei Medici; and again dur- 
ing the minority of Louis XIII, when Marie dei Medici 
was Regent; but the stormiest of all, perhaps, was 
the minority of Louis Quatorze. During those same 
years which troubled the order of England and in- 
augurated our great Revolution, there was in France 
an echo of the same tumult; a light, laughing echo, 
as full of gaiety as of carnage, a medley of masquerades 
and massacres, of ladies and lances (such fine ladies, 
such free lances!), where the generals were the beau- 
tiful Madame de Longueville, Madame de Bouillon, 
and the Grande Mademoiselle. One of the actors in 
the drama (Retz) has left us the liveliest picture of it, 
and shows us the Hotel de Ville in Paris, where two 
lovely Duchesses had their military headquarters: 
"A medley of blue scarves, and ladies, and cuirasses, 
and violins, a sound of drums and of trumpets, an 
atmosphere as of a romance of Chivalry." So writes 
Retz; but there was a method in the madness, and a 
logic underneath the laughter, as indeed there nearly 
always is in the great gay, tumultuous quarrels of 
France. The manner was different, but the matter 
of the conflict was the same on either side the Channel : 
it was the struggle of Parliament and prince; of a 
Constitutional Government and an absolute mon- 
archy; of Jesuit on the one side, of Galilean, Jansenist, 
or Protestant on the other; the eternal conflict of 
authority with freedom. Voltaire is right enough 
when he says that these madcaps of Frenchmen, with 
their madrigals and their mistresses, pursued exactly 



140 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

the same aim as their serious neighbours overseas, 
when they cut off the head of their King ''avec un 
acharnement melancolique et une fureur raisonnee." 
Where Voltaire goes astray is when he supposes that 
the Fronde, like the English Parliament, attained its 
end. The Fronde was defeated absolutely. For it 
is as well to undertake seriously so serious a matter as 
the reform of a national constitution. The Fronde 
had to wait a hundred and forty years before (this 
time seriously enough) it resumed its heroic effort in 
1789. 

For the moment the autocracy of the King was 
absolute. One year after the defeat of the Fronde, 
the Parliament was required to enregister a certain 
necessary war loan. Now, nothing is more difficult 
than to believe that one is dead; the Parliament, its 
blood still tingling from the recent battle, ventured 
some poor show of criticism or remonstrance. They 
were in full debate when the young King strode into 
the House, dressed in his hunting clothes, his horse- 
whip in his hand : 

"Gentlemen [said he], we all know what troubles 
have lately ensued on your debates; I have a plan to 
prevent any retiirn of the annoyance. I order there- 
fore that these debates shall stop! Monsieur le pre- 
mier President, I forbid you to suffer these assemblies, 
and you, gentlemen, I refuse you the right to attend 
them." 

Thus was the Parliament dissolved. In England a 
similar act produced a revolution. In France it in- 
augurated the era of absolute obedience. Our West- 
ern civilizations, France and England, are by now so 
thoroughly imbued with democratic theories that we 
can barely admit (what would seem so evident to 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 141 

a contemporary German) that Louis XIV honestly 
beHeved that he was furthering the social progress 
of his country by turning it aside from the goal of 
Democracy, He saw no tyranny in thus dissolving 
Parliament, no hardship in levying taxes at his will on 
an unrepresented people. He was the fount of law; 
his royalty was independent of the consent of the gov- 
erned. His standard of values was other than ours, 
but just as logical and coherent. His aim was Power, 
not peace; and, since the nation best fitted to wield 
a sovereign power is that whose citizens submit to a 
central discipline accepted by all, he proposed to his 
subjects an ideal of Order, not freedom; of Might, 
not right; of Faith, not truth; he praised not justice 
but Sacrifice; Authority, not reason; and all this was 
set in a radiance of national honour and military 
glory; this was the Sun-King's object, which well may 
not be ours; yet is it one of the two greatest concep- 
tions of a strong society. 

Such as it was, no doubt, the military progress of 
France was ensured by his refusal to accept anything 
short of absolute centralization, monarchy, and unity. 
There is in the French character a vein of uncompro- 
mising logic; a determination to push a proposition 
to its conclusion, which makes French History invalu- 
able to a student. During a long reign — or at least 
through more than fifty years of it — Louis XIV showed 
us in action the theory of Absolute Monarchy; and if 
he left his kingdom ruined and in rags, he left it not 
only grander and larger, but far greater than France 
had ever been before. The King of France was the 
leader of Europe; the King of England was his humble 
pensioner, and his grandson — his son's son — was one 
day to reign on the diminished throne of Spain. Al- 



142 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

ready, in 1664, John de Witt, speaking to the States- 
General of Holland, found France alone in Europe 
really great: "The Empire [said he], is a skeleton, 
whose dry bones are strung together not with living 
nerves and sinews, but with links of wire; Spain is a 
broken reed"; and England under Charles II a servant 
and pensioner of Louis XIV. 

On the morrow of the Fronde, the King had cele- 
brated his accession to power by a medal, struck with 
the inscription "Order and Felicity." And the people 
had believed they were to see again the prosperous 
days of his grandfather, Henry IV. But he brought 
them no peace but a sword. War upon war inflated 
France with an atmosphere of glory and grandeur ; the 
Peace 'of Westphalia left vanquished the Empire; the 
Peace of the Pyrenees humbled Spain; in 1670 
the King occupied Lorraine; two years later he con- 
quered Holland, took Franche-Comte, again attacked 
the Empire, and soon decided to wage two wars at 
once — against Spain, and against that old enemy of 
Spain, our England. War is the King's sport; he 
loves war for war's sake as well as for the praise and 
the profit that it brings. Henry IV thought of the 
country; Francis I thought of his knightly honour; 
Louis XIV thinks of history and the world's admira- 
tion. His eye is always on the gallery; the words 
Fame, Renown, Posterity, are never absent from his 
mind. His letters and Memoirs are eloquent in this 
respect : 

" I envisaged with pleasure the idea of these two wars 
as a vast field of activity, whence at any moment might 
arise opportunities and great occasions for distinguish- 
ing myself and answering to the brilliant expecta- 
tions which I had already excited in the public. . . . 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 143 

"I ruminate in my mind the plans which I have 
conceived, plans not impossible: how fair they seem!" 

"I determined as more advantageous to my plan of 
campaign, and less common from the point of view of 
the glory to be gained, to attack at the same moment 
four places on the Rhine, and to command in person 
the four besieging armies. I hope none can say that 
I have disappointed public expectation!" 

And in fact in four days (between the 4th and 7th 
of June, 1672) the four besieged fortresses fell. 

The pomp and splendour of these armies was worthy 
of a prince in a fairy tale. Every campaign ended 
in a sort of royal pageant : coaches of crystal and gold, 
horses draped in cloth of gold, courtiers and con- 
querors dazzling with diamonds, ladies all silks and 
plumes and laces; "Solomon and Darius were out- 
distanced," writes Coligny, in describing the campaign 
of Flanders. 

And, to our mind, the small size of these armies is 
as remarkable as their magnificence. Probably Louis 
XIV never possessed more than 200,000 soldiers. In 
1672 he invaded Holland with 172,000 men, divided 
in two armies: it was the first time in modern times 
that so great a concourse had ever been assembled; 
and all Europe felt its peace and its equilibrium threat- 
ened by such a preponderance of force in the hands 
of so ambitious a prince. 

The cost of these campaigns was immense, and it is 
marvellous that France resisted during fifty years the 
continual drain of men and money. But Louis had 
been no less fortunate than his father and his grand- 
father in his choice of a minister. He drove the car 
of the State with a pair: Louvois, who organized his 
armies, and Colbert, who helped him to govern his 



144 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

kingdom. Neither one nor the other was a Prince of 
the Church Hke Richelieu or Mazarin. Colbert was 
the son of a merchant of Reims, the very incarnation 
of the burgher spirit, regular, hardworking, economical, 
a hater of waste and profusion. The letters of Colbert 
to his King are an excellent commentary on the history 
of the reign. 

In 1665 he begins his protestations: 

' ' I have fancied that Your Majesty was beginning to 
prefer amusement and pleasure to any other thing," 

Colbert was a marvellous administrator; in ten 
years he doubled the King's revenues. But his facto- 
ries and model farms, his canals and his colonies, his 
fleet, his finance, could not bring money in as fast as 
Louis spent it! Colbert kept the King's accounts; 
he directed himself no less than six ministries — was 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Minister of Agriculture, 
Director of the Board of Trade, Chief Lord of the 
Admiralty, Home Secretary, and Colonial Secretary ; 
Colbert worked sixteen hours a day, and every day, 
in filling the treasury of France; but the King with 
his wars and his mistresses, his pleasures and palaces, 
spent four-and-twenty hours out of every day and 
night in emptying that golden hoard. 

Already in 1670 the expenditure exceeded the re- 
ceipts by three million livres; by 1680 the deficit 
almost reaches thirty-five million! 

If but the King would limit his expenditure to suit 
his revenues! But Louis had never cut his coat ac- 
cording to his cloth: "Sa Majeste n' a jamais consults 
ses finances pour resoudre ses depenses.'' Would he 
but consent to confine himself to a budget of sixty 
millions {"trois fois autant qiC Henri Quatre ait jamais 
depense'') and the indefatigable minister promises 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 145 

that the country shall support the strain. But Louis' 
thoughts are elsewhere. He is thinking of his pro- 
jects {"Qu'ils sont beaux/"). He is dreaming of the 
praises of History which are, he says, "exquises. ..." 
And Colbert begins to speak of the ruined provinces; 
of the difficulty of setting in the taxes ; mutters some- 
thing of a "universal bankruptcy," till, having, at 
four-and-sixty years of age, no longer the strength to 
support a tension never relaxed and a hopeless dis- 
appointment, he dies, so to speak, at his desk. 

Thenceforth the affairs of France go steadily and 
rapidly downhill. Louvois, uncompensated by the 
frugal, the prudent Colbert, spent vast sums in reor- 
ganizing the military strength of France. The fiscal 
system was deplorable; and Colbert, with his sincere 
love of the working class, his interest in commerce 
and agriculture, was no longer there to correct by a 
wise supervision and protection the abuses that the 
system entailed. The poor were more and more 
oppressed. 

In the preceding century, when France was more 
than half ruined by the wars of religion, Henry III, 
as a last desperate expedient for raising a considerable 
sum of ready money, had farmed out certain taxes, 
for a sum paid down, to certain financiers who were 
to collect them at their own risks and pocket the differ- 
ence. This odious system was now efficiently organ- 
ized. The crown, with its desperate deficit, sold its 
taxes dear; the landlords, at Versailles or the Army, 
were in nine cases out of ten absentees; the peasants 
of France were therefore at the mercy of the tax- 
collectors, who squeezed them hard and strong. These 
Farmers-General, or Crown Agents, were as a rule 
men of no birth, no gentle or noble tradition; a large 



146 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

proportion of them had risen from the servant class, 
had been lackeys or butlers in noblemen's houses, 
then stewards, and so had obtained through their 
masters' influence some small receipt of taxes, from 
whose profits they purchased in time an agent's office 
from the crown; such were Gourville, Paul Poisson, 
Lange, Delisle, etc. The list is long of the multimil- 
lionaires who began life in the servants' hall and lived 
to marry their daughters into the old nobility. Not 
all were such. Many of the Fermiers-Generaux were 
enlightened patrons of the arts, and some were cordial, 
kindly souls, like that cousin of Madame de Sevigne's, 
M. d'Harouys, who was, says Saint-Simon, "le meilleur 
homme du monde et le plus ohligeant, et ne savait que 
preter de V argent''; but these, as a rule, came to grief, 
and we know that Harouys died in prison. As a rule 
they were hard, clever, industrious financiers. Such 
men (says La Bruyere, who saw them in their splen- 
dour) "are neither kin nor kind, neither citizens nor 
Christians; they are hardly men: they are just rich 
people." 

The literature and Memoirs of the times are full of 
references to the cruel hardness of the collectors of 
taxes : evictions, forced sales of household goods, fines, 
imprisonments, followed regularly in their wake. The 
reports of the Intendants (a sort of royal Prefects, 
instituted by Richelieu) are full of compassion for the 
victims of a system they were compelled to uphold: 
"This way of gathering in the taxes is too cruel!" 
writes the Intendant of Amiens in 1688. Of all these 
taxes the most hateful was the salt-tax, and, as it 
was comparatively easy to evade, dreadful punish- 
ments were meted out to the "faux-sauniers,'' that is to 
say to all such as used, procured, or sold any kind of 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 147 

salt save that to be bought from the King's officers. 
Men were deprived of their Hberty for having boiled 
their cabbage in a little sea-water to give it a savour. 
At Caen, in 1678, others were kept for years in prison, 
half-starved, on the mere unverified charge of "faux- 
saunage." In 1684 the Intendant of Soissons, visit- 
ing the prison at Guise, found there eleven wretches, 
men, women, and children (for five of them were 
under thirteen years of age), who for the last fifteen 
days had been crowded in a dark cell, not twelve feet 
square, which they were none of them allowed to quit 
on any pretext (' ' ce qui est contre la pudeur et la decence 
comme contre Vhumanite'), seven of whom were charged 
with smuggling salt and four with evading the tobacco 
tax. At Vernes the salt-frauders were kept at the 
bottom of a dry well, quite dark (save for that one 
glittering star of the unattainable free daylight over- 
head), to which a ladder gave access, which was re- 
moved after the prisoner's descent. At Saumur, on 
one occasion, some salt-smugglers, kept too long in a 
dungeon under the moat, died on the staircase that 
led them to the light, suffocated by the first free blast 
of living air. The salt-tax was heavy — the tax being 
twelve times the value of the substance taxed — and 
obligatory, since persons were not left free to say they 
had no taste for the condiment; a minimum of pur- 
chase was imposed. Add to this royal mulcting of 
Nature's natural manna the many local taxes on wood, 
water, forage, and such like; consider the exactions 
of the nobles, who levied a tax of their own on the 
manorial mill and on the manorial oven, which alone 
were entitled to grind the farmer's corn and bake his 
loaf (for it was illegal to possess a mill or baking-oven 
of one's own); remember the obligation of stocking 



148 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

one's cellar from the landlord's vineyards, and we see 
how the current flows which is bearing France to ruin 
and revolution. 

Let those who would learn more on these matters 
read Vauban's Dime Roy ale, the Correspondance des 
Controleurs Generaux in Depping's edition, or Beau- 
lieu 's Les Gabelles sous Louis XIV. 

Meanwhile, at Versailles, the King in his splendour 
reigned in a palace such as the world had never seen, 
glittering with mirrors and gold, paved and lined with 
precious marbles, decorated with paintings represent- 
ing the battles and the triumphs of the Great Monarch, 
and looking out over an immense park whose per- 
spectives, whose alleys and bosquets were peopled 
with bronze and marble statues and reflected in vast 
sheets of artificial water, where lovely fountains 
played. The King lived there in a perpetual feast 
of music (he was personally an excellent musician), 
adulterous love, gaming, hunting, conversation, and 
religious worship. Versailles, which broke the heart 
of Colbert, for it helped that "general bankruptcy" 
he dreaded and cost a round seventy millions of francs, 
which we may assess at three hundred millions of our 
times — Versailles had this further ill effect, that it 
isolated the King from the nation as no King of France 
had hitherto been separated from his subjects. Ver- 
sailles is a world away from that oak-tree of Vincennes 
beneath whose boughs Saint Louis used to sit and judge 
the quarrels of his people. 

The last years of the Roi-Soleil were not happy: 
the sun set in a bank of ominous clouds. The King, 
who in his youth had shown a certain quality of sound 
good sense and natural moderation even in his excesses, 
was soured and hardened by the abuse of power. He 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 149 

sacrificed all reality and nature to an artificial con- 
ception of unity and authority. He could not endure 
that any of his subjects should venture to differ from 
his view of things. In 1685 he revoked the Edict of 
Nantes, by which his grandfather had conceded liberty 
of conscience and certain humble and fragmentary 
freedoms to the Protestants of France. The France 
of Louis Quatorze must come into the King's pattern! 
After odious persecutions and more than mediaeval 
cruelties, the bolder spirits, fleeing from forced con- 
version, death, or the galley-slave's hopeless oar, 
escaped when escape they might (for this resource 
was officially forbidden them), and yet slipped away 
innumerably into England, Scandinavia, Switzerland, 
Germany, and added in a few years one-third to the 
population of Berlin. Two hundred and fifty thousand 
members of the Reformed Religion are said to have 
quitted France in consequence of the Revocation. 

Thus the King who had raised his country to such 
a pinnacle of glory and grandeur mulcted her not 
only in money but in men. Louis lived to taste 
the bitterness of defeat : more than once France \7as 
invaded, vanquished. Paris was threatened. And 
though, when things seemed darkest, a great French 
victory flung its weight into the scales and set things 
straight again, so that the ensuing Peace of Utrecht, 
in 17 13, left France still the first Power in Europe, 
with a French prince on the throne of Spain, still the 
victorious country was exhausted, impoverished, and 
generally hated by her neighbouring States. 

The future loomed dark. Already in 1709 the 
King at Versailles had listened to the angry cries and 
threats of the famished citizens of Paris. Already 
France had left behind her the great, proud, pompous, 



150 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

glorious, august century of Louis XIV. Already 
people began to murmur of justice and freedom. 
There was the first raw breath of Revolution in the air. 

The experiment of Absolute Monarchy had been 
tried, and had failed. 

We have raced through this admirable seventeenth 
century and seen but little of all that made it great, 
as we may, on a hurried journey, cross the Alps by 
night, or pass the Italian lakes invisible and wrapt 
in mist, having no time to delay even to see the world's 
wonders. Science — that change in the point of view 
which suddenly transformed the small, neat, anthro- 
pocentric universe of the Middle Ages into the Infinite 
Cosmos, the silence of whose endless spaces terrified 
Pascal; Science, with its discipline of doubt, and 
the consequent reaction of passionate natures more 
than ever insistent on the need of Sacrament and 
Cross: Descartes and Pascal, Bossuet and Fenelon, 
and the Saints — Francis of Sales and the greater Vin- 
cent de Paul; and the poets, the greatest France has 
known between the Chanson de Roland and Victor 
Hugo: Comeille, the prophet of honour, courage, 
and man's indomitable will; Racine, the tender, cruel 
interpreter of a broken heart in all its subtlety and 
feigned restraint; Moliere, with his inextinguishable 
laugh, his appeal to Nature and reason; La Fontaine, 
with his exquisite simplicity, another child of Nature, 
and (like Moliere) in his last reaction, under all the 
fun and the frolic, infinitely sad — we must leave these 
great genuises and others, though they illustrate and 
explain the century of Louis XIV — and are indeed 
as much an integral fibre of modem France as Shake- 
speare and Milton are of modern England — yet we must 
leave them behind us for sheer lack of time and space. 



THE CENTURY OF LOUIS XIV 151 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Memoires du Due de Saint-Simon. 

Memoires et Lettres de Retz. 

Lettres de Madame de Sevigne (Collection des Grands Ecrivains 

de la France). 
Memoires de Louis XIV pour Vinstruction du Dauphin. 
CEuvres de Louis XIV. 
Depping: Correspondance adminisrative sous le Regne de Louis 

XIV (Collection des Documents in^dits). 
Voltaire: Le Siecle de Louis XIV. 
Michelet: Histoire de France; Louis XIV. 
E. Lavisse: Histoire de France; Louis XIV, 
Beaulieu: Les Gabelles sous Louis XIV. 
Sainte-Beuve: Port-Royal. 

Prevost-Paradol: Essai sur I' Histoire universelle. 
Jacques Boulenger: Le Grand SiMe. 
Madame Duclaux: Madame de Sevigne. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

When we leave the seventeenth century for the eight- 
eenth, we seem to quit a noble hall admirably propor- 
tioned, majestically grand, but not exactly suited to 
any purpose of modern life, and to find ourselves in 
a maze of small and pretty rooms, often disgracefully 
dirty, but charmingly decorated, commodious, and 
well-lighted. The grand old Christian ideas of the 
preceding age: Eternity, the supreme importance of 
the human soul, faith, loyalty, the sacrifice due to 
king and country, the beauty of Unity, seem suddenly 
to have dropped sheer out of existence; as though, 
like notes too much thumped on a piano, the last 
generation had hammered them mute. It is but a 
few 3^ears since Bossuet preached, to the edification 
of all the court, how God had permitted the English 
Revolution, Civil War, and the death on the scaffold 
of King Charles I, in order that Henriette of England 
might die, in exile, a Roman Catholic. To even the 
dawning eighteenth century this point of view ap- 
peared as remote as the Middle Ages. Bayle, in the 
great Dictionary of History which heralded the modem 
period, already makes his mock of those who say that 
great calamities are Heaven's means of purifying the 
souls of princes: "The public" (says he) "se passerait 
bien de tels bains!" For the point of view has changed. 

152 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 153 

Science and Nature become the passion of the hour; 
and, when once we get down to the bedrock of Nature, 
there is no such immense difference between man and 
man. We consider them in their generation and their 
death, and we wonder why one should be the Sun- 
King and the other a starving serf. A new tender- 
ness for the poor, a sense of human equality, a desire 
to dispose the State in accordance with Reason and 
Justice, instead of continuing the reign of tradition 
and privilege, such were the signs of the times that, 
from the very first years of the new century, began 
to -startle minds accustomed to the absolute rule of 
King and Church. Between 1707 and 17 12 an Arch- 
bishop (Fenelon), a Marshal of France (Vauban), 
and a magistrate (Boisguilbert) made known their 
separate schemes for sweeping reforms which, had 
they been adopted, might have saved France the 
expense of a great revolution. But Louis XIV was 
deaf to the voice of the charmers. He disgraced the 
Marshal (who, being tender-hearted, as old soldiers 
often are, forthwith died), he kept the Archbishop in 
exile and banished the magistrate. But he could not 
banish their ideas. 

Louis XIV survived by fifteen years the century 
that bore his name. In 17 15 he died, and left the 
throne from which he had reigned for two-and-seventy 
years to a child of five years old, thenceforth Louis XV. 
The situation was tragic, for France was bankrupt, 
with an annual deficit of sixty-five million francs, and 
no man in the kingdom had so deplorable a reputation 
as the Prince-Regent. This was Philippe d'Orleans, 
the late King's nephew, a curious, witty, intelligent, 
irresolute creature, a chemist, a would-be reformer, 
and a debauchee. There was scarce a crime of which 



154 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

men did not publicly accuse him. Because he was the 
doting, foolish father of a bad young woman, they 
whispered of incest and said aloud he had no preju- 
dices. Because (mysteriously enough, it is true) the 
Dauphin, the Dauphine, and one of their sons had all 
died suddenly in the space of a few weeks, they mur- 
mured: "Who was the next heir? the Regent, of 
course!" For the great poison-trials of 1676 and 1680 
were still fresh in the public mind. 

Even Fenelon, the wise and the just, even Fenelon, 
who loved the Duke of Orleans, lent an ear to these 
terrible suspicions. And Louis XIV, though his robust 
good sense qualified his nephew a braggart of imagi- 
nary crimes, " unfanfar on de crimes," secretly modified 
the provisions of the Act of Regency so as to protect 
the person of the babe who was his heir. 

We, who know the Regent by the masterly, full- 
length portrait of him which fills many volumes of the 
Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon, and by the more 
intimate, familiar jottings of his mother's Correspon- 
dence, we may feel sure enough that this gifted and 
good-natured libertine, impressionable and sometimes 
base, was yet not quite Macbeth. No Richard of 
Gloucester, either; no Wicked Uncle scheming to 
assassinate the Babes in the Wood. We have wit- 
nessed that burst of tears, that uncontrollable sob, with 
which, to Saint-Simon's surprise, he greeted the news 
of the first Dauphin's death, though it removed from 
his path a hostile kinsman. Many of the great memo- 
rialist's immortal pages are still moist with Philippe 
d'Orleans' "droppings of warm tears." We there- 
fore know him for what he was; a Man of Feeling, 
the first of a type frequent enough throughout the 
eighteenth century, a man of impressions and curiosi- 



TBE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 155 

ties, utterly unprincipled, sometimes perverse, yet 
full of the milk of human kindness, disinterested, ami- 
able. . . . Diderot, Rousseau, have traits in common 
with him. But then the type was new; and those 
who judged the Regent by the standard of the intoler- 
ant, noble, cruel seventeenth century supposed him 
a man ambitious of power, and, knowing him for an 
atheist, thought it natural that he should be a monster 
and a murderer. 

The Regent's first act was to pronounce himself the 
champion of reform, to restore to the Parliament its 
long-confiscated powers, affirming, in a phrase borrowed 
from TeUmaque, that, though his hands were bound 
to keep them from doing evil (an allusion to the late 
King's secret codicil), yet he would leave them free 
to accomplish good. Now, for the successor of Louis 
Quatorze, when opening Parliament, to quote Fenelon 
— and especially TeUmaque — is as though the Tsar 
had suddenly spouted the most reprehended pages of 
Tolstoi to the Duma. Such a quotation is a pro- 
gramme in itself. 

But when it came to the point of actual reform — to 
the question of deciding how to pay off the national 
debt and restore the finances of the kingdom — that 
programme became vague. One party (headed by the 
Duke of Saint-Simon) proposed to repudiate the debts 
of the crown and start with a clean slate. But what 
sort of a reform is that which commences with a 
national bankruptcy? The Regent's curious, investi- 
gating mind, always open to a new idea, preferred to 
accept the suggestions of a Scottish financier, one 
John Law of Lauriston. 

John Law was an inventor in finance. As is the 
way of inventors, he failed, and left an unenviable 



156 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

reputation, while later experiments took up his ideas, 
gave them a twist here and a turn there, and so re- 
newed the world. For John Law invented the system 
of credit. The standard of value was gold. John 
Law recommended the concentration of the moneyed 
wealth of a nation in a central bank (no private person 
being allowed to keep in his house more than twenty 
pounds in gold), and the conduct of affairs by a system 
of letters of credit. For what is a bank-note but a 
letter of credit signed by a name universally known 
and respected, the name of the State? Each State 
according to his system, ought to possess a central 
bank, which should be, at the same time, an inland 
revenue office, receiving dues and taxes, and thus 
dispensing with the onerous services of the tax-farm- 
ers. No doubt but in his system he was inspired 
(as Voltaire declares) by his remembrance of the Bank 
of England and the English East India Company; but 
he pushed his theory to an extreme. 

The central bank, continually renewed and replen- 
ished by the revenues of the nation, was to obtain 
the privilege of issuing a proportion of paper notes, 
guaranteed by the State, accepted by the public for 
their nominal value, but representing in reality only 
one-fourth of their worth in gold. Law actually 
founded his bank with a capital of six millions divided 
into twelve hundred shares, payable for three-fourths 
in State-guaranteed bank-notes. The success was 
prodigious; by the exercise of credit and the issue of 
paper money, the difficulties of the financial situation 
appeared dissipated; the State, continually in receipt 
of taxes, was a security not to be despised, and com- 
merce revived. 

The Regent, ever in love with new and bold ideas, 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 157 

was enchanted. In 1618, two years after its founda- 
tion, he dubbed Law's bank the Royal Bank of France; 
the farmers-general were dismissed and, in many 
cases, compelled to disgorge; Law was appointed the 
supreme Comptroller of Finance; he was made Master 
of the Mint; already, in 171 8, he had been conceded 
the monopoly of French trade with India, with Sene- 
gal, and also with the Mississippi; the shares in his 
West India Company were the fever and the passion 
of the hour. The public, tired of poverty and eco- 
nomy, speculated wildly; shares in Law's bank worth 
five hundred livres (or francs) at their emission rose 
to the extraordinary price of twenty thousand francs. 
It is a question whether Law's system might not 
have answered had the public jobbed and speculated 
with a less fantastic fury; despite its ultimate disaster, 
it undoubtedly stimulated trade, industry, and the 
circulation of wealth. 

We must remember, before we judge the schemes 
of Law (and that English echo of them, the South 
Sea Bubble), that, in 1720, nations had still before 
their eyes the example of a Power which had, in actual 
fact grown fabulously rich by speculating in American 
trade. Spain, so mighty in the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries, was at last too weak to maintain her 
clutch on the gold and the spices of the New World. 
Law's Company might have been successful had he, 
instead of speculating, perfected the means of trans- 
port. The cotton, the sugar, the quinine, the tobacco, 
the chocolate, the coffee, and the indigo of the West 
India Company would have found purchasers in France 
had they come to hand. 

It was unfortunate that the Royal Bank was soli- 
dary with the Company. A sudden mysterious panic 



158 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

precipitated the crisis. When it was known that the 
bank would pay no more than ten pounds on any- 
single account (an example followed by all the banks 
of France in the autumn of 19 14 with no ill results), 
the public lost its head. On the 17th of July, 1720, 
sixteen persons were killed in the crush before the 
gates of the establishment in the rue Vivienne, The 
Parliament refused to renew the privileges of the 
West India Company, and these envied treasured 
shares sank to the level of waste-paper. Law fled for 
his life to Venice. The Regent alone could not stem 
the tide of events (though he never quite lost his faith 
in the clever Scotchman and his last project was the 
recall of Law); in the general consternation that fol- 
lowed the crash, the new measures stood condemned; 
the farmers-general were recalled, and the finances 
of France resumed their accustomed, more leisurely 
pace on the road to ruin. 

The dearest illusion of the Regent was that, in his 
person, his illustrious great-grandfather, Henry IV, 
lived again. He had cast himself for the part and 
intended, by much the same means, to restore France 
to prosperity. The reform of finance was the first 
step (and here, as we have seen, he tripped), the second 
was to change the direction of the kingdom's foreign 
policy. For the last hundred years the tides of France 
had set towards Spain, towards Austria, and her 
policy had been Catholic and (if I may use a modern 
term) Conservative; as Louis XIV had said, when 
his grandson ascended the throne of Spain, "The 
Pyrenees are abolished!" — "// n'y a plus de Pyrenees." 
That was in 1700. A score of years later, the Regent 
was inclined to re-establish that range of mountains 
and, instead, to abolish the Channel. He exiled the 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 159 

Stuart Pretender, drew closer to the Hanoverian King 
of England, concluded a triple Alliance between France, 
England, and Holland, and in all things attempted to 
institute a liberal policy. 

But Philippe d'Orieans had none of the grit, the 
pluck, the tenacity pf the little Bearnais, His good 
nature, his facile vices, his wit, his liberal ideas, may 
have been a legacy from the great ancestor. What 
he lacked was the endurance and constancy that sees 
a thing through. As his own mother said: six fairies 
were invited to his christening and endowed him with 
all manner of gifts and graces, but a seventh fairy 
(whom thay had forgotten to invite) added this pro- 
viso: that none of them should be of any use to him 
— or, we may add, to any one else. He had not, in 
short, that spice of grim earnestness without which 
the ship's captain seldom weathers a storm. 

And the liberal policy failed, just as the financial 
reforms had failed. And in fact England was the 
worst enemy of France throughout the eighteenth 
century, sweeping her colonies, one after the other 
into the Tom Tiddler's ground of perfidious Albion: 
taking Madras, burning Pondicherry, seizing all that 
Indian Empire which Law had planned, which Du- 
pleix and Le Bourdonnais had conquered; snatching 
Senegal by surprise; next, leading her armies to the 
New World, annexing Canada: Quebec, Montreal, 
Acadia. The Mississippi was no longer French; 
New Orleans alone remained the isolated relic of a 
ruined dream. Scant wonder if, at the end of the 
century, the French fought with gusto to help the 
Americans shake off the yoke of the English pirate. 

I can only see one good thing that fell out — and 
that in the most casual, inconsequent way — in con- 



i6o THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

sequence of the Regent's change of policy. When 
France broke with Spain, the Government sent back 
(as a piece of returned goods) the little Spanish prin- 
cess, already imported and being "saved up" for 
Louis XV, and married the young monarch instead to 
the daughter of Stanislas, King of Poland. Kings of 
Poland are seldom lucky; this one as usual lost his 
crown. And his young son-in-law of France felt him- 
self in honour bound to wage war upon the German 
Emperor in order that the crown might be restored. 
The two monarchs came to an arrangement — happier 
at least for France: King Stanislas did not recover his 
Polish throne, but he was made, for life, the Duke of 
Lorraine, on the understanding that at his demise 
the duchy should be added to the realm of France. 
Stanislas had a romantic and beautiful adoration for 
his one child, his daughter, the French Queen, and he 
spent the rest of his days in rebuilding the city of 
Nancy, making it the most graceful, if not the most 
beautiful city in Europe, so that his dying bequest 
might at last be worthy of her — and of him. 

This duchy of Lorraine was indeed a great acquisi- 
tion, protecting France on her weak, exposed north- 
eastern frontier, and bringing a rich mineral region 
and a keen, valorous population into the national 
fold. But it is the only piece of political good for- 
tune which happens in all that long reign of Louis 
Quinze (the Regent had been carried off by a stroke 
of well-earned apoplexy in 1723), which is the least 
interesting, the least noble, the least fruitful (I mean 
from the political point of view) in all the history of 
France. There was an almost total absence of organ- 
ized political life. 

At the close of the reign, France was no longer the 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY i6i 

first kingdom in the world: England ruled the seas; 
and, in Europe, two new States, Prussia and Russia 
by their rapid rise, ambition, and importance, threat- 
ened the balance of power. 

France was a charming, inconsiderable State, mighty- 
only in the realm of intellect and art, but there ad- 
mittedly supreme, and looked upon by other nations 
as a sort of Earthly Paradise, where life (at least in 
polite circles) was happier than elsewhere. 

"The scheme of things will last as long as I," said 
Louis XV, "and after me the floods will sweep it 
away. Apres moi, le deluge.'' 

The age of Louis Quinze was not an age of glory. 
Contrasted with the reign of Louis Quatorze, we see 
the ugliness of its absurd contrasts and the monotony 
of its dull frivolity. And yet it was, undeniably, an 
age of progress. Not in territory and not in wealth; 
it, too, contributed to the growth of France by the 
general diffusion of knowledge and the gradual con- 
stitution of a public mind. The form of national 
life was changed. King and court were nowhere; 
Versailles of no account. And the real King of France 
(in exile) was perhaps Voltaire. At any rate, Paris 
had seized and kept the whilom supremacy of Ver- 
sailles. And in the capital the Orleans princes kept 
up an increasing rivalry with the crown. In the eyes 
of the Parisians (who never forgot how the Regent 
had transferred to their city the seat of power), they 
— and they only — were the real descendants of Henri 
Quatre. Versailles appeared to them at once odious 
and old-fashioned. While France remained attached 
to the monarchy, as a principle, the dissolute, ignorant 
King, in his person seemed the degenerate monster 
of an antediluvian period to those circles which, 



i62 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

grouped round the Duke of Orleans and the great 
financiers, were occupied in elaborating the conceptions 
of the future. 

By 1750 Paris is again the centre of France, and the 
intellectual fashions and passions of the hour emanate 
from a few salons round the Seine. A sort of League 
for the Common Weal binds together the farmers- 
general and the great bankers, who possess the ma- 
terial wealth of the nation, and the men of letters and 
philosophers, who are forming its mind. Round the 
supper-tables of the rich financiers the thinkers of 
France are already preparing a revolution. 

What is our Constitution? asks Voltaire, in his 
Siecle de Louis Quinze. A tissue of contradictions. 
Wherever we cast our eyes we meet incoherence, harsh 
cruelty, incertitude, and arbitrary caprice. The feudal 
anarchy exists no more, and yet its laws and usages 
subsist, so that French legislation is in a state of 
intolerable confusion. There are as many sorts of 
jurisprudence as there are towns in France! The 
man who has gained his suit in Brittany may lose it 
in Languedoc. If there be some semblance of a clue 
in the maze where the provinces are subject to Roman 
Law, let us not forget that there are forty thousand 
Roman laws, without counting the commentaries. 
But what shall I say (he proceeds) of those unfor- 
tunate provinces which are subject, not to law, but 
to local custom? There are five hundred and forty 
different customs in France, if we count all the pro- 
vinces, towns, and even villages which are exempt 
from the principal jurisdiction of the kingdom. A 
man who should travel through France in a post and 
chaise changes the law he is governed by more often 
than he changes horses ! Customs of a barbarous an- 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 163 

tiquity maintain the force of law, and the ignorant 
Parisian who shall hire and inhabit for a year and a 
day a house in Franche-Comte, finds himself, to his 
consternation, a slave, a serf, mainmortahle — incapable 
of bequeathing his own fortune to his own kith and 
kin! 

I ask pardon for so long a quotation; but how could 
I show more plainly in so short a space the confusion 
of French law, the dissatisfaction of the public with 
its hopeless chaos, and that universal cry for Unity, 
for Order and Liberty, which, little by little, will bring 
about a revolution? "In this age [says Voltaire] we 
are lovers of perfection; let us try to perfect the laws 
under which we live." 

In such a questioning, sceptical, libertine age, one 
might have supposed that the nation, continually 
oppressed by the weight of its ill-administered finance, 
would have called to account the authorities respon- 
sible. But such was the prestige of the monarchy in 
France that for thirty years the Fronde of the intel- 
lectual party (the Intelligentsia, as they would say 
in Russia) remained, so far as practical politics were 
concerned, purely theoretic. Montesquieu, in search 
of liberty, remains almost a conservative. Voltaire 
was in no wise a democrat, but a constitutional mon- 
archist of a conservative type; it was religious liberty, 
it was Free Thought, for which he was ever ready to 
break a lance; it was in the reakn of ideas that he 
was a revolutionist. In his youth he had been exiled 
to England, and he returned bringing with him some- 
thing of the spirit of Newton, Locke, and Shakespeare, 
exalting, recommending, and occasionally translating 
the works of these great men, throwing broadcast 
that fertilizing seed of English poetry, English thought, 



i64 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

English experimental science, English constitutional 
ideas, which filled with so vast a harvest the second 
half of the eighteenth century in France. Voltaire 
was a renewal rather than a revolution. He spent, 
in fine, some sixty years in saying, in exquisite terms: 

"Be clean; take your tub; open free baths for the 
people. 

"Be kind; don't burn witches; don't hang Pro- 
testants; and if a girl have an illegitimate baby, or 
a soldier desert in time of peace, judge them as ye 
would be judged. 

"Keep well; don't have the smallpox. Believe me, 
if you are inoculated, it is quite unnecessary." 

Such were the commandments of M. de Voltaire. 
The society he dreamed of would have been a per- 
fectly well-regulated and disagreeable despotism, much, 
as M. Faguet has observed, like the First French 
Empire with all the glory left out — a world in which 
the sole important things would be good health, 
success, and power, excellent things in their way. . . . 

Louis Quatorze would never have believed that, 
for thirty years, you could openly and publicly call 
in question the existence of God while continuing to 
respect the government of the King. Yet it is only 
toward 1750 that the constitution of the monarchy 
is seriously and definitely criticized : 

"Fifty years ago [writes the Marquis d'Argenson 
in his Memoirs] the public took no interest in politics. 
To-day, even in the provinces, every one reads the 
Gazette de Paris, everyone has an opinion." 

And again (in 1759) he says: 

"A philosophic wind of free, anti-monarchical gov- 
ernment has stirred us all; and it is possible that this 
government may take form in our minds and come 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 165 

into actual being on the first opportunity. Perhaps 
the revolution may take place with less opposition 
than men have supposed — nay, on the contrary, be 
greeted with applause." 

Meanwhile Voltaire records : 

"Towards 1750 the nation, tired of literature, of 
the Opera, of Jansenism, began to take an interest 
in the Com Laws. ..." 

About the same time, in 1755, appeared the first 
pamphlet to fall from Rousseau's pen: the Discourse 
on Inequality among Men. This last is indeed a date! 
If the seventeenth century has been named the century 
of Louis the Fourteenth, we might well call the eight- 
eenth century the Age of Voltaire and Rousseau: Vol- 
taire, the Apostle of Reason; Rousseau, the Prophet 
of Nature. Voltaire had the advantage of knowledge 
and length of days; but the little man from Geneva 
was the Master of the age. Instead of attempting 
Voltaire's mild reforms, he sought to reorganize society 
on a different system — in fact, to shatter it to bits and 
"remould it nearer to the heart's desire." "All is 
good [said Rousseau] when it leaves the hands of God. 
Man is born virtuous. The social convention has 
corrupted him. We must therefore destroy society 
as it exists to-day; it is but a pact made between men 
for their convenience; since it is no longer convenient, 
let us renew the Social Contract." 

Rousseau was a native of Geneva, the descendant 
of French Huguenots, who, in the sixteenth century, 
had been compelled to flee their country for conscience' 
sake. We might almost say that Rousseau's Contrat 
Social was their revenge! It is the result and the 
resume of the political theories elaborated by the 
Protestant jurists of Geneva. More than once in 



i66 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

these pages I have drawn your attention to the deep 
Repubhcan marrow of the Reformed religion ; the 
Huguenots in exile wrought their theories to a finer 
point; and while French Catholicism, more and more 
Italianate with the process of centuries, arrived at an 
absolute conception of government (an autocratic 
monarchy, which regarded the people merely as a 
possession and attribute of the king), the jurists of 
Geneva declared equally absolute the sovereignty of 
the people. 

The idea that the real fount of all authority springs 
from the people is a very old idea in France. ' ' Kings 
reign by popular suffrage," so Milon de Dormans, 
Chancellor of France, had laid down the law in 1380. 
''Nam, et si centies negent, reges regnant suffragio 
populorumy 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Due DE Saint-Simon: Memoires. 

DuCLOs: Memoires secrets sur la Regence. 

Voltaire: Siecle de Louis Quinze. 

Bachaumont: Memoires secrets. 

Madame d'Epinay: Memoires. 

Marmontel: Memoires. 

Marquis d'Argenson: Memoires. 

H. Taine: L'Ancien Regime. 

E. Lavisse: Histoire de France. 

J. Michelet: Histoire de France. 

Casimir Stryienski: Le Dixhuitieme Sihcle. 

Emile Faguet: Dixhuitieme Steele. 

Albert Malet: Dixhuitieme Sihle, Revolution, Empire. 



CHAPTER V 

LOUIS XVI 

France had despised and contemned its sad and dis- 
solute old monarch, Louis XV (who once had been 
Louis-le-Bienaime) , but the country still remained 
attached to the idea of royalty, and Louis XVI was 
welcomed with enthusiasm. The people saw in their 
young prince a possible saviour. Even the Radicals 
did not disassociate the scheme of Revolution and the 
monarchical system: they hoped to seat on the throne 
another Henry IV or — still better — a constitutional 
king, like "Farmer George" across the Channel, for 
despite political rivalry, all that was English, from 
kings to turnips — and from a representative parlia- 
ment to the new "swimming plough," maintained its 
full prestige in France. 

Those immediately about the court conceived less 
lofty expectations. The young King had an excellent 
disposition, but very little mind, and the court exagger- 
ated his slow dullness, which was not devoid of good sense 
— so much so that when, on his marriage to the lovely 
Princess of Austria, the poet Marmontel suggested a wed- 
ding-masque derived from the fairy tale of Beauty and the 
Beast (in French, La Belle et la Bete), the Minister of the 
Menus-Plaisirs had hurriedly interrupted: "Oh, no! 
The public would think it an allegory!" 

167 



i68 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

The court, perhaps; not the pubHc. They knew 
that their young prince was brusque — sometimes 
even rough — in his manners; they knew also that he 
was moral, sincere, and kind; they said that he re- 
sembled that Duke of Burgundy, Fenelon's pupil, who 
had died young, threescore years agone, depriving 
France of a crowned reformer ; they liked Louis no less 
that he was so little of a courtier; that he spent his 
days at a locksmith's bench when he was not hunting 
in the forest; that he liked talking to the common 
people, and was awkward and shy with the wits about 
the court; that he was indifferent to all the race of 
women, even, it was said, to his own exquisite bride 
(and that, for obvious reasons, was a pity), knowing 
no passion so strong as the desire to serve and to save 
his siiffering people. 

The truth lay somewhere between these two extremes. 

"The King is the honestest man in the world," 
said an Englishman who knew him, Arthur Young, 
"with but one wish, which is to do right," yet he too 
laments Louis' lack of foresight and "decisive parts," 
and that hesitating irresolution, born of too strong a 
conscience and too weak a mind, which made him ever 
the prey of the last opinion heard, imstable as water, 
constantly tacking and trimming a course which could 
not keep one constant goal in sight. Easy and le- 
thargic, and sometimes so supine that he seemed 
merely stupid, one cannot imagine a character less 
congenial to the French; but Louis XVI resembled 
his German mother, the Princess of Saxony. Really 
well-meaning, amiable, full of human kindness, he 
had yet the most extraordinary sense of his own royal 
superiority; that "right divine" which his people 
had begun to question was transparently evident to 



LOUIS XVI 169 

Louis XVI. Although sincere — indeed, ingenuous to 
the point of candour — he was not always truthful 
and this occasional dissimiilation sprang from nothing 
mean; he considered himself so far above his subjects 
not by his personal worth but through his kingly 
office, and so responsible to Heaven for them, that 
he practised with them sometimes, for their own good, 
an economy of truth, as grown people must in their 
dealings with little children or with sick people. In- 
tensely conscientious and utterly devoid of tact, con- 
stantly vacillating, sometimes he would suddenly 
crystallize into that terrible nervous obstinacy which 
the French call "etre bute,'' and was then as impervious 
to argument or reason as any hysterical woman. With 
all this, kind to the core, human to an extent that 
made all who approached him love him, and yet exas- 
perating to deal with, for no man could count upon 
the King (despite his love of right, his real moral 
worth), because of that weakness of mind in him, and 
that still more fatal weakness of will. 

It is unfortunate that, after some years of complete 
indifference, the lethargic King awoke to the fact 
that he was married to the most lovely and the most 
charming princess in Europe: "the most beautiful 
woman I saw at Versailles," says Arthur Young, 
while Horace Walpole wrote in ecstasies of the liquid 
grace of her every movement, the poetry of motion. 
Her brilliant, soft complexion, her sweet, long blue 
eyes and the abundance of her thick, blond hair made 
her a dazzling apparition to all Northerners; while 
French observers, always great sticklers for regularity 
of feature, remarked the too long oval of her face, 
the prominent underlip that spoke of the Hapsburgs, 
yet admitted that she possessed in perfection "la 



170 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

grdce, plus belle que la beaute." When at last the 
"Bete" discovered his "Belle," his subjection was 
complete, and the revenge of Marie-Antoinette for 
years of conjugal indifference was a complete ascend- 
ancy. The King and she were, in politics, on different 
sides of the hedge. Despite his exaggerated ideas of 
royal rights, Louis XVI was at heart a Liberal monarch; 
he firmly meant to guide his people into an area of 
comparative freedom and poptilar prosperity. The 
Queen had none of her mother's political ability (she 
was the daughter of the great Maria-Theresa), but 
a head full of the most violent aristocratic prejudices 
and disdains. Again and again Louis would swear 
fidelity to the new-planned Constitution; five minutes' 
conference with his adored Queen and he was planning 
to abet the intrigues of the Ultra-Royalists. 

All this was not, of course, immediately apparent. 
For years, the Queen took no part in politics. She 
was a spoiled child who thought of nothing but her 
pleasure. Her German idea of Gemuthlichkeit and the 
fashionable theories of Rousseau made her abhor the 
restraint, the ceremony, the absence of all private 
retirement, which hedged in the life of a French Queen. 
She was expected to live, move, eat, dress, even bear 
her children, in public. Marie-Antoinette rebelled. 
She would have a life of her own; and in taking this 
innocent pleasure she managed to displease all parties 
alike. The old nobility, to whom the Queen was a 
sacred thing — almost like the crown or the flag — were 
horrified to watch her gadding with a young brother- 
in-law to the balls of the Opera or the risky little 
theatres of Paris, or even (as the old Marquis of Mira- 
beau complained) "flitting about the gardens and 
galleries of Versailles in a little frock and apron, fit 



LOUIS XVI 171 

for a farmer's wife, with neither page nor lackey in 
attendance, and glad to accept the arm of any fellow 
in a frock-coat [polisson en frac, i. e., not in court 
dress] when she wishes to descend a flight of steps." 

Meanwhile the people resented yet more bitterly 
the selfishness of the Queen's uncontrollable expenses. 
The country was ruined, the possibility of a national 
bankruptcy the theme of every serious conversation; 
but the Queen's high play, her passion for precious 
stones, her debts, her bets, her dressmaker's bills (she 
did not always wear the little cotton frock!), her daily 
conferences with Madame Bertin, the modiste, and the 
extravagant fashions that she launched; the vast 
sums, too, that she lavished on her bosom friends and 
favourites, — gained for her the reputation of a heart- 
less frivolity. The people called her 'Madame Deficit" 
before they dubbed her " I'Autrichienne." 

But that was ten times worse! The day was to 
dawn when Frenchmen would begin to suppose that 
their beautiful young Queen betrayed the country of 
her crown for the benefit of the country of her cradle. 
Louis XVI alone might have weathered the storm; 
his wife was a cargo, too precious to cast overboard, 
whose dead weight would sink the royal ship. 

Perhaps the first faint rift between the Queen and 
the nation may be placed at the date of the Anglo- 
American War (1778-83), when the whole French 
public eager to avenge its wrongs on England and 
enraptured to find a country overseas inspired by its 
own new liberal ideas, flamed up in a sudden enthu- 
siasm for American Independence. Liberty was the 
generous frenzy of the hour; Franklin, with his wise 
head under his Quaker's hat, the idol of Paris. But, 
while La Fayette led his Expeditionary Force across the 



172 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

ocean to fight for the insurgents, the court hung back. 
Franklin had won from Louis XVI a treaty of alliance. 
Yet, now that the blows fell thick, now that the cause 
of Revolution prospered, the King and Queen of 
France began to feel that odd kinship, that intimate 
freemasonry, between sovereigns which is deeper than 
any national hate. The king listened impatiently 
to the popular praise of Franklin; he said nothing. 
But, to one lady of his court who sang those praises 
too constantly, he presented a portrait of the Trans- 
atlantic Reformer painted on the inside of I will not 
say what chamber utensil. The Queen, on the other 
hand, was loud in her regrets of the shabby trick that 
France was playing her English cousin, by assisting 
the rebellion of his insurgent subjects. She did not 
conceal her hostility, and, at the signing of that peace 
of 1783 which established the freedom of the United 
States she affected to treat the English as her dearest 
friends. 

While all Paris was seething with the new ideas of 
Liberty, social and political equality, the Rights of 
Man ; while the Peace of Versailles (which restored to 
France her colony of Senegal and four of her lost Indian 
cities) was filling the country with the still richer 
joy of hearing herself acclaimed the fairy-godmother 
of a liberated world, the Minister of War, Segur (or 
rather, in point of fact, the court), in the very wanton- 
ness of brutal opposition, revoked an old edict of Louis 
Quinze, already in force for more than thirty years, 
which permitted men of less than noble birth to take 
rank as officers in the army. 

According to this new edict, no officer might now 
attain the grade of captain unless he could prove four 
generations of noble forefathers or show himself at 



LOUIS XVI 173 

least the son of a Chevalier of St. Louis; nor, should 
he enter the Church, could he hope to rise beyond 
some village vicarage. The French provinces were 
full of comfortable and cultured families, a little less 
than noble, a good deal more than humble, in which 
for the last thirty or forty years the eldest son had 
inherited the family manor, the next had risen to dis- 
tinction in the Army, the third was doubtless abbe 
of some comfortable benefice, for the fourth his parents 
had bought some post in the magistrature, while the 
fifth made his way in the office of some Intendant or 
financier. 

Imagine the consternation of the generation of 
young Frenchmen who attained their twentieth year 
about 1780! Men born in cultivated yet laborious 
homes; accustomed to a prolonged effort; capable of 
working, if needs be, twelve hours a day. By reason 
of their education and experience, these young bour- 
geois were generally in advance of the sprigs of no- 
bility; at the examinations of the Artillery-School it 
soon became a proverb that "the competent were not 
noble and the noble were not competent." Let us 
imagine the chagrin, the rancour, of men of talent 
and character — men such as Laclos (I was going to 
say, such as Bonaparte, but he was noble) — men such 
as all Bonaparte's generals — men such as Bamave, 
Camot, Danton, an energetic race, conscious of their 
own superiority, full of ambition, capacity, and energy, 
yet condemned in every career to take the lowest 
room and to contemplate (with Heaven knows what 
barely stifled rage) the young half-sharp of sixteen 
quarterings, who, because he has taken the trouble to 
be bom, assumes himself a natural superior. And of 
course I do not mean (in that age of all ages, whose 



174 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

nobility was so rarely gifted, so open-minded, so 
generous and so gracious) that the duke was, by reason 
of his birth, mentally inferior to the doctor. Not at 
all: a Liancourt, a La Rochefoucauld was equal to 
the best. But the time had gone by when the Govern- 
ment might assume in the noble a natural capacity, 
in the man of the middle class a natural incapacity, for 
any post or any art — even the art of war. "Nothing 
[wrote Rivarol], not the taxes nor the lettres de cachet, 
not the laws nor the abuse of authority, not the des- 
potism of the provincial Intendants — nothing irritated 
the nation so sorely as the prejudice of noble prece- 
dence . . . c'est le prejuge de la noblesse pour leguel 
elle a manifests le plus de haine.^* 

Anger against a Government which wasted the public 
fortunes of France, rancour against an aristocracy 
which barred all the avenues to fortune save those 
of finance, these were the sentiments with which the 
middle class greeted Segur's edict. They asked a 
fair field and no favour, and equal taxation for the men 
of every class. The common people had their own 
grievances. The working class was organized in 
guilds or corporations, the number of whose members 
was fixed and might not be exceeded (even as to-day 
the Royal Academy in England, the Stock Exchange 
in France), and as the sons of the master- workmen 
generally succeeded to their fathers in the exercise 
of their craft, it was difficult for an apprentice, born 
with no silver spoon in his mouth, to rise from the 
ranks; it was even hard enough to enter those ranks 
as an apprentice, for the number of apprentices was 
also fixed and formal. The workmen asked free access 
to their craft and the abolition of the guilds. 

But the farmers and peasants had most of all a 



LOUIS XVI 175 

pressing need of reform. They were more and more 
conscious that their life was Httle better than a state 
of servitude. The King's taxes and the parson's 
tithe ate up the profit of their harvests. They were 
compelled to labour for their landlords so many days 
in the month or year without pay, to lend them on all 
occasions their carts and horses, to offer them as a 
present certain portions of their crops and stock, to 
bake their own bread at a fixed tariff in the landlord's 
oven, to buy their own wine at his press, with other 
vexations which once had been conveniences, or at 
least due return for service rendered. What angered 
the peasant with a slow, sullen, dangerous ire was that 
he was beginning to perceive that in exchange no 
service was rendered. His corvee and his redevance 
had been a part of his rent, and he paid the rent as 
well; the money and goods he expended had been in 
exchange for military protection, and the nobles no 
longer protected him, were incapable of protecting 
him, had no right to attempt it. For the system of 
government had changed, while his dues and debts 
alone remained unchanged. In fact, he was keeping 
up two distinct governments: a feudal system which 
had long ceased to exist, save in its abuses; and a 
centralized monarchy no less oppressive. For every 
hundred francs he gained, he had to squeeze out fifty- 
three for the necessities of King and country; another 
turn of the screw wrung fourteen for the landlord's 
dues; then the Church came, exacted another fourteen, 
and left the poor man crushed: with how much re- 
maining for his rent, for his daily bread and the nur- 
ture of his family? Wonderful thrift of France, there 
was still sometimes a sou in his stocking! But the 
fear of the fisc made him hide it like a crime, exaggerate 



176 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

even the appearance of his most real misery, lest the 
tax-gatherer should come and take also the one ewe 
lamb. 

If the land was so exorbitantly taxed, there was an 
excellent reason to account for it; only the poor paid 
toll; those alone who had nothing to spare supported 
the immense expense of State, Army, Law, and Church. 
The thing appeared iniquitous to the conscience of the 
age, and the first reform the Tiers-Etat meant to 
exact was the abolition of the privileges of the nobles. 
When Arthur Young travelled in France, on the eve 
of the Revolution, he told the peasants, as it were a 
fairy-tale, that we, in England, have a great number 
of taxes, "but the poor do not pay them, they are 
laid on the rich ; and, what is more, we have in England 
a tax paid by the rich for the relief of the poor." Sure, 
those poor people had never heard of such a Topsy- 
tiirvyland! Most of the miseries of their distressful 
country sprang from the opposite system: only the 
poor were required to pay, who could not pay; and the 
rich, who wanted for nothing, were in nothing mulcted 
of their affluence! Thus, since the reign of Frangois 
Premier, every year the King of France had spent 
more money than he received, and had tried to annul 
the deficit by heaping a further burden on the poor 
peasant's back, that was already broken. By the 
accession of Louis Seize even a Minister of Finance 
could see that this process would yield nothing further. 
Louis had had some of the best ministers, and some 
of the worst, in French history. He had begun with 
a man of genius; his name was Turgot: "7/ n'y a que 
M. Turgot et moi qui aimons le peuple,'' said the King 
— "Only Turgot and I really care about the people." 
Turgot had attacked the sacrosanct system of the 



LOUIS XVI 177 

nobles' privileges and had begun by abolishing the 
corvee: the forced labour of peasants; he was a Free- 
trader, and had attempted to reform the Corn Laws. 
But great was the ire of the lords and landed gentry. 
And the weak Louis, against his will, had abandoned 
his minister. 

His successor, Necker (the father of Madame de 
Stael), a Swiss banker of English origin, had not the 
bold, wide views of Turgot, the reformer, the first 
Free-trader; but he was a wise financier, a cautious 
economist, a clear-headed, painstaking administrator. 
He had already found some sort of a clue in the chaos 
of French finance when some court cabal (the court 
had no relish for economy and disliked Necker for his 
bourgeois stiffness, for his foreign origin and his Pro- 
testantism) again turned the King against the servant 
who might have saved him. This time the finances 
of France were entrusted to a man of the world, M. 
de Calonne, who gave satisfaction to everybody 
with whom he came in contract. His talent appeared 
prodigious; the poor King owned that he had never 
been so tranquil; his long confabulations with Turgot, 
and especially with Necker, had sometimes fatigued 
him, but, such was the facility of M. de Calonne, that 
the maze of financial difficulties appeared illuminated; 
no trouble in the present; no anxiety in the future; 
''son travail avec le roi n'etait qu'un jeu'' {Marmontel). 
And the people at court were just as pleased as the 
King. Unlike that bear of a Necker; unlike the cold, 
proud, Turgot, M. de Calonne never refused to grant 
a favour or to do a kindness. No wonder if he were 
the most popular man, if not in France, at any rate 
at Versailles! 

Unfortunately, when, after four years in place, M. 



178 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

de Calonne looked carefully into his accounts, he 
found there a deficit of a hundred and fifteen millions 
of francs. This was the verge of bankruptcy. Arthur 
Young, who was travelling in Prance that year (1787), 
remarks how, in every serious conversation, that topic 
of a national bankruptcy would occur, with the further 
question (he puts it in italics) : 

Would a bankruptcy occasion a civil war and a total 
overthrow of the Government ? 

The King was obliged to recall Necker. But Nec- 
ker was no magician, and though at the news of his 
return the French loan rose some thirty points, all he 
coiild do was to advise poor Louis to convoke the 
States-General: that is to say, to unite the members 
of the Three Orders of France: Nobility, Clergy, and 
Tiers-Etat, in order to ask them to furnish forth the 
funds which must redeem the debt. 

The States-General had not met since 1614 — since 
the majority of Louis XIII — and the King knew well 
that they would not meet simply to find a way out of 
his financial difficulties: they would insist upon re- 
form — all sorts of reforms — they would exhume old 
abuses and make bad blood. The King himself was 
not so much opposed to a certain measure of enlightened 
reform; but his youngest brother, Artois (he who was 
afterwards Charles X), and especially the Queen would 
be violently, passionately against it. The King knew 
well that he would be asked to abolish the privilege 
of the nobles and the clergy. And partly from con- 
viction and a sense of honour, but partly also from 
what I dare hardly call the dread of a row with his 
wife, the King did not mean to consent to any such 
abolishment. 

The States-General met at Versailles on the 5th of 



LOUIS XVI 179 

May, 1789; thanks to the influence of Necker, a 
double representation (as it was called) secured the 
Tiers-Etat, which stood for ninety-eighty per cent, of 
the nation, as many deputies as the two other Orders. 
From the very first hour, its superior ardour and 
energy were manifest. Those young men who had 
found no outlet for their powers in the Army, in 
diplomacy, in the Church, were there in crowds (there 
were eleven hundred deputies of the States-General, 
and half of them belonged to the Tiers-Etat). 

There they were: members of the States-General 
or spectators and encouragers of its proceedings; they, 
with their wounded vanity, their relentless logic, 
their burning Utopian dreams. Nothing is so danger- 
ous as the logician who is also a dreamer. He may 
be Laclos; he may be Robespierre; he may be Bona- 
parte; in any case he is sure to be an uncomfortable 
neighbour. Such silent and concentrated ambitions 
were not rare in 1789, when success was a privilege 
of birth or royal favour; when unprotected genius in 
a modest rank was frequently compelled to eat its 
heart out unremarked; when the issues were closed 
in front of a proud spirit; when humiliations were 
frequent and anger mute. At last the flood-gates 
were opened. 

Like the barons of our King John, these young 
men asked of the King that which France had never 
possessed: a written charter, a Constitution. They 
demanded the suppression of privileges. They de- 
cided that the States- General should be called the 
National Assembly; that its members, all equal, 
should no longer be divided into Orders. They de- 
clared the equal Rights of Man, born free, admissible 
to all careers. They maintained that no sealed letter 



i8o THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

of the King's could ravish from them this, their own 
inherent freedom, but only the judgment of the Law. 
They decreed the sovereignty of the People. They 
pronounced the abolition of privileges and the equality 
of all men before the tax-gatherer. The King should 
no longer demand a sum fixed at his own good pleasure ; 
it was the deputies of the National Assembly who 
henceforth should decide what moneys they would 
vote; and over the expenditure of these moneys they 
would keep a right of control. 

So far, so good. The King fretted and fumed. 
To one of the royal proposals the Duke of Orleans 
objected that it was illegal. "Legal enough, since I 
wish it!" cried Louis, voicing in his pettish discon- 
tent the very principle of autocracy: ''Si! c' est legal, 
parcegue je le veux I" He spoke of his divine right, his 
good pleasure, and his absolute power, and then sank 
into his plump and smiling apathy, ending invariably 
by granting what indeed he had no longer the power 
to refuse. The National Assembly was intoxicated 
with its own success. Admirable, so long as it was 
occupied in framing a permanent Constitution for 
the future, it lacked discipline, experience, tradition. 
Would it show itself equally adequate to the crucial 
difficulties of the present ? 

The Assembly was now the sovereign of France. 
The King, though king in name, had lost all executive 
power. Can we blame Louis XVI that he sought to 
evade this sad position of a faineant king? He ap- 
pealed to his troops to maintain his authority. In 
his horror of civil war, he imagined that the foreign 
mercenaries, Swiss and German, which the Govern- 
ment kept at its disposal, would be less inflamed and 
angry than the French; and doubtless also he thought 



LOUIS XVI i8i 

that they would be less easily converted by the enthu- 
siasts for liberty. He summoned them all. And 
soon, round Paris on all sides — at Charenton, at 
Saint-Denis, at Courbevoie, at Sevres, at La Muette, 
on the Champ de Mars, — a complete ring of troops, 
some twenty-five thousand strong, French and for- 
eign, surrounded the capital. Paris lay in the midst 
of them like a beleaguered city. This move of the 
King's (or, as the people supposed, of the Queen's), 
and especially his appeal to the Germans, exasperated 
the Parisians. Bread was already cruelly short: did 
the King mean by a set blockade, by the argument 
of fire and famine, to refute the Rights of Man? 
False rumours flared up like wildfire — that the Queen 
and Artois had a plot to poison the King {Young), 
that the German dragoons were massacring the people 
in the Tuileries Gardens (Marmontel). And the know- 
ledge that the capital was unprovided with either 
food or fire-arms added the keen tip of fear to the 
popular anger. 

On the morning of the 12th of July Paris learned 
(and this time the news was true) that the King had 
dismissed Necker and all the Liberal ministry. A 
sombre wrath smouldered all day in the mind of the 
people that flared up at night, on the Boulevards, 
into a great, fierce blaze of indignation. Next day 
the mob attacked the H6tel de Ville and the Invalides, 
demanding arms. If the King meant to fight, they, 
too, would show him what Paris could do in that line! 
Especially the public feeling incriminated the Queen; 
no doubt but Paris imagined itself in the snare of a 
second Catherine dei Medici. The lion roared its 
wrath of her feminine treachery. The people surged 
in the streets, sleepless, by day and night, shouting: 



i82 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

"Arms and bread!" By a miracle, the city which 
possessed no soldiers found in its every citizen a 
soldier equally able to obey or to command. The 
sack of the Arsenal and of the Invalides supplied a 
certain insufficient quantity of arms. And on the 
morning of the 14th of July (ever-memorable date, 
henceforth the national holiday) the people of Paris, 
dragging with them the cannons of the Esplanade, 
marched on the Bastille, the King's fortress, the bul- 
wark of the monarchy, the immense frowning keep 
which for four hundred years had thrown the gloom 
and threat of its colossal shadow across the popular 
quarter of Saint-Antoine. The Bastille was part of 
the fortifications of Paris, but, above all, it was 
the State prison; it was to Paris what the Tower 
was to London. Its eight vast towers with the 
cannon on their platforms seemed to menace the 
seething faubourg at its feet: Down, dog, crouch! 
Be quiet! 

The governor of the Bastille had neither garrison, 
munitions, nor food to withstand a siege; and doubt- 
less he feared to bombard the unruly capital; he had 
no orders to destroy Paris. And so, like a young 
lion in sport, in the course of a summer's day, Paris 
tore the great mass to pieces. By the end of the after- 
noon, the King had no Bastille. To-day the tranquil 
waters of the Canal of Saint-Martin cover its ruins. 

When the Duke of Liancourt broke the news to 
the King at Versailles: "C'est une revolte,'' said Louis. 

"Nay, Sire," replied the Duke; "it is not a revolt; 
it is a Revolution." 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

WiCKHAM Legg: Select Documents of the French Revolution. 
Taine: VAncien Regime. 



LOUIS XVI 183 

Lavisse : Histoire de France. 

Michelet: Histoire de la Revolution. 

Arthur Young: Travels in France. 

Marmontel: Memoires, t. iii. 

Madame Campan: Memoires sur la vie de Marie- Antoinette. 

Albert Malet: XVIIP Siecle, Revolution, Empire. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 

And now begin ten years which loom so large in His- 
tory, we scarcely can believe they merely were ten 
years. The Revolution, like a fiery plough, cut through 
France a fertilizing furrow, deep and unspeakably cruel, 
yet on the whole salutary. It buried out of sight all 
that hitherto had caught the eye and glittered, while it 
lifted out of the depths, in a supreme upheaval, fresh 
beds of virgin soil full of growth and unsuspected vigour 
of production. 

In those ten years what an eddying dance of the 
whirligig of Time! The Revolution did not at once 
define its aim, which was the combination of liberty 
and unity : when a new idea comes into being it seldom 
springs fuU-fiedged from the nest! The first concep- 
tion of the men of '89 was a federation of provinces, 
each retaining its own essential life and character. 
They saw the State as a community of communities. 
It was the mediaeval pre-Renaissance view; but all the 
modem democracies still were federal: Switzerland 
with her concert of cantons, the United Provinces of 
the Netherlands; and those United States of America 
which France had helped to liberate and which, natur- 
ally enough, appeared especially a model to copy. 
And there were others in the State who admired the 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 185 

supple strength of the British Constitution and re- 
commended it for imitation. 

The French RepubHc was to be like none of these, 
but forged in tyranny and terror to such a degree of 
unity and patriotic energy as the world had not yet 
witnessed. Those men of '89 will, for the most part, 
die on the scaffold, accused of federalism as though it 
were a crime, the blackest form of treason — as perhaps 
indeed it was, at that moment. 

The history of France is full of coups d'etat — brusque 
transformations of the Government by means of an 
extraordinary stroke of policy. But the great Revolu- 
tion did not spring like a bolt from the blue; the cloud 
had hung on the horizon, threatening, for more than 
fifty years. When it broke at last, it was with no 
sudden thunder-clap, but in heavy spots, falling one by 
one, and in approaching rumblings, leading up to the 
unimaginable and shattering crash of the tempest 
unchained. And threat followed threat with intervals 
so promising that even now we wonder whether a 
firmer conduct on the part of the Crown might not have 
averted, or at least diminished, the full catastrophe. 

On the 5th of October, 1789, some eight thousand 
women of Paris marched on Versailles. They were 
angry at the continued shortage of bread, half-starved, 
and persuaded that the King meant to starve Paris into 
submission; convinced, too, that the Queen meditated 
some traitorous coup d'etat. Louis had unwisely sum- 
moned the regiment of Royal-Flanders to Versailles: 
like so many of his actions, it was at once too much 
and not enough; a whole army might have inspired 
terror and respect for the Crown ; one foreign regiment 
was a senseless provocation. 



i86 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

And the court had played the fool and made matters 
worse; the King's Bodyguard had given a banquet to 
Royal-Flanders, while Paris was without bread. The 
royal family had attended; the band had played "0 
Richard! mon roi, VUnivers fabandonne," and the 
well-known air had excited a paroxysm of Royalist 
sentiment. Five or six soldiers of Royal-Flanders had 
torn from their caps the tricolour cockade and had 
stuck a white ribbon in its place. All this was known in 
Paris on the morrow, commented on and magnified. 

So the women of Paris set out for Versailles at the 
head of a mob of insurgents. The Garde Nationale — 
that volunteer non-uniformed militia which had come 
into being on the 13th of July, by a process of spon- 
taneous generation, in order to save the capital from 
some mysterious, wholly imaginary Saint Bartholomew 
which the Queen was supposed to meditate — the Garde 
Nationale, then, forced its general, La Fayette, to lead 
these valiant, hungry shrews on their wild mission. 
And this at last he did, in the hope of protecting the 
royal family from their rough caresses. . . . But 
who has not read, in the romantic pages of Carlyle or 
of Michelet, the wonderful tale of the women's raid 
on Versailles? No page in the history of France is 
better known than the story of their mad endeavour 
and its success. 

And the King left Versailles at their bidding, stipu- 
lating only that he should take with him his wife, his 
sister, and his children, whom in truth he dared not 
leave behind, knowing himself to be, in spite of all, so 
much the most popular personage of them all. It was 
a wrench at his very heart-strings, a plunge in the 
abyss. Louis knew well that henceforth he would be, 
at least for a time, the prisoner of Paris. Would he 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 187 

win the hearts of his unruly subjects, like Henri Quatre, 
and find his true glory in his arrogant capital? For 
the last hundred years no king had dared to dwell in 
Paris ! Was this step a leap backwards to the popular 
rule of the little Beamais? Versailles was the very 
symbol of absolute monarchy, the visible emanation 
of Louis XIV. For the King who quitted it sadly it 
was more than this: it was the scene of all his life. 
Hunting was his one passion, and here were his woods; 
metal-work his one pleasure, and here was his forge; 
here were all his friends; his habits, so dear to an in- 
dolent and lymphatic nature; in these high galleries 
he had first neglected, and then adored, his spirited, 
undisciplined Queen. For one long moment Louis 
hesitated. If he must quit Versailles, it was still 
possible to escape through Trianon to Rouen, or to 
make a dash for Metz, as the Queen advised and 
urged. But flight would mean civil war. . . . Who 
knows? Perhaps a crown for his Constitutional cousin, 
the Duke of Orleans! 

So Louis went to Paris — let the shrieking, dishevelled 
Meenads carry him off. Through his carriage-window 
he saw the dancing madwomen, brandishing yellow 
poplar-boughs snatched from the autumnal trees: a 
wild cohort they looked, escorting the coach of the 
King! And, through this moving wood, a gleam of 
metal showed where the soldiers' pikes lifted in the 
air the loaves of bread conquered from some sacked 
bakery; but two of their pikes supported the mur- 
dered heads, still dripping, of the Royal Guards who 
had died to save their King. He saw that; he must 
have heard the ghastly threats howled at the Queen, 
sitting by his side: "Give me her entrails to make a 
fine cockade!" "No, I'll take her legs!" and so on, 



i88 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

in obscene jest and threat. Yet when, after nine hours 
of that terrible journey, they arrived in Paris, Louis 
exhibited that automatic and uncanny cheerfulness 
which he showed in all the tragic moments of his 
life, disconcerting our sympathy by its inappropriate 
good-humour. They reached the Tuileries by torch- 
light; supper was served at ten. Louis astonished 
all beholders by his prodigious appetite. "The King 
looked radiant [writes a witness]. The Queen had 
on a little black cloak, a hood, no rouge. She has 
lost her fixed, eagle gaze and the proud carriage of 
her head." 

The Assembly lost no time in following the King to 
Paris. The great affair of both was the new constitu- 
tion. Louis was as well persuaded as any revolutionary 
of the need for reform. Had he not tried in vain for 
fifteen years to govern his kingdom? He had begun 
with a Liberal minister, Turgot, and Turgot had found 
the task too much for him, giving as his excuse ''La 
France n'a pas de constitution ! ' ' And then Louis had 
tried a Conservative premier; but M. de Calonne had 
made a far worse mess of it, and had finally declared 
the kingdom "impossible to govern." 

We have seen in a preceding chapter what Voltaire 
thought of the French constitution, its tissue of con- 
tradictions, its incoherent jumble of laws. France was 
an agglomeration of duchies and provinces acquired 
in differing conditions at different times. Some were 
Pays d'etat, represented by their own provincial States 
or Chambers; others were Pays d' administration, 
governed directly by the Crown; north of the Loire 
there were Pays de droit coutumier, whose legal system 
was based on feudal law and barbarian tradition : each 
town, each province had its own variety; while, south 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 189 

of the great dividing river, the country was Pays de 
droit ecrit and its jurisdiction a modified survival of 
Roman Law. Some of these provinces succumbed 
beneath the load of their taxation, while, a few miles 
off, a neighbouring district would be almost enfian- 
chised from the general expenses of the Slate. The 
first task of the constituent deputies was to break up 
all this muddle and to reduce to some sort of rule, and 
order, and unity the incoherence and the inconsistency 
of France. 

Their work was far from perfect, and yet they did 
wonders. They sketched the first rough draught of 
the France we know to-day. The Revolution was to 
draw up six Constitutions in the space of eleven years. 
They all followed, in essentials, the plan of the Con- 
stituante. It began with a clean slate; the provinces, 
with all their discrepancies, were abolished; France 
was divided into eighty-three departments, each with 
its subsidiary districts and cantons. In every canton a 
justice of the peace, in every district a county court, 
in every department a Court of Assize, and in Paris a, 
Court of Appeal. The same law was administered 
from Flanders to Provence and from Lorraine to 
Brittany. A magistrate was no longer an official who 
purchased his place and bequeathed it, with his other 
property, to his son. 

The law was henceforth above all privilege. The 
King might no longer, by virtue of his sealed orders 
ilettres de cachet) , send a man to prison at his own sweet 
will. The nobles had no longer their private courts 
and their rights (even, in some cases, of life and death) 
over their subjects. The clergy were forbidden to 
incarcerate the erring nun and the disobedient priest 
according to a system of their own. The law was 



I90 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

universal and equal. France was not yet free, but a 
great blow had been struck for equality. 

It would have been well, perhaps, if the Revolution 
rould have stopped here and have henceforth developed 
by a process of evolution. The King was generous, 
humane, and much less of a fool than is generally 
supposed. But too many passions and interests were 
engaged; the financial question was too involved; the 
army too disorganized and deliquescent, owing to the 
long abuse of privilege. And Louis himself, it must 
be owned, though a good creature, had neither the 
genius, the constancy, nor the intellect which alone 
could ride the storm. 

His position in the new Constitution was ambiguous 
and ill-defined. He might propose no law — the laws 
were voted by the Chamber; but he had a right of 
veto — that is to say, he might delay, suspend, retard 
the execution of any law voted by the Chamber for 
a term of five or six years. The Assembly was to be 
renewed by election every two years; the King might 
suspend a law till the next legislation but one; if, after 
that time, the deputies stuck to their text, he must 
needs recall the veto. But, as a matter of fact, the 
rebellious, resentful nation contested every application 
of this right of veto, which was to prove, as we shall 
see, the undoing of the King. 

He had, in addition, the right to declare war and to 
choose his ministers; that is to say, the nominal right. 
But woe betide him if he called to office an unpopular 
premier; and the first war he declares, it will be with 
tears in his eyes, for the people's enemy is the King's 
ally: Austria. The unfortunate Louis seems to us a 
King Log. If he had been more of a King Log it might 
have been well for him. But he took the Constitution 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 191 

seriously, learned it by heart, attempted not to overpass 
the limits of his restricted sovereignty (which must 
have seemed so humble to the grandson of Louis 
Quinze), and used in all good faith the kingly rights 
which were set down in the charter as his due appur- 
tenances. 

The King and his family passed a melancholy year 
in Paris, prisoners, or almost, in their half-dismantled 
chambers of the Tuileries. If any ray of hope, as 
summer came again, shot across the gloom of their 
long confinement, it was not the result of the plots and 
plans of the venturesome Royalists who (when so 
many emigrated) followed their sovereign to Paris and 
set up house, so to speak, in the very jaws of the lion. 
The bright eyes of the Royalist ladies who, covered 
with white favours and Bourbon lilies, came and went 
temerariously and promised help from Coblentz, 
Conde, Cobourg, Brunswick, Pitt — all quarters of the 
compass — these were not the dispensers of comfort; 
but for one summer's day the King believed that he 
and his people had sworn a covenant, that peace 
reigned between them, and that the days of Henri 
Quatre had dawned again. 

It was on the 14th of July, the anniversary of the 
Fall of the Bastille. A great public festival was to 
commemorate the event and to celebrate the still 
unterminated task of the Constituent Assembly. 
Every little town in France was to send its delegates, 
chosen from the volunteer militia of the provincial 
municipalities, while Paris was to assemble all the bodies 
of the State to witness the solemn conjunction of 
monarch and nation. A year later, in a mood of bitter 
resentment, when Louis drew up the manifesto which 
explained the reasons of his flight to Varennes, he 



192 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

reverted with a sudden tenderness to the memory of 
that one halcyon day — ''les momens les plus doux de 
mon sejour a Paris'' — and to the attachment and de- 
votion which the citizen militia of France had then 
shown to his person. They had come in their cohorts — 
these bourgeois volunteers — from all the towns and 
villages of the kingdom ; by their spontaneous adhesion 
they reconstituted France ; and, in the midst of sceptical, 
dissatisfied Paris, they represented the mass of the 
nation, enthusiastic for Freedom and the King, and 
seeing between their two idols no incompatibility. 

For their congregation the great bare field of the 
Champ de Mars had been surrounded by tiers of grassy 
steps or benches, rising in an amphitheatre occupied 
by two thousand Parisians. In the middle of the plain 
rose the Altar of France: "TAutel de la Patrie'' — four- 
square, with at each corner a group of a hundred 
priests, their white surplices barred by a tricolour sash. 
At the altar itself, Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, said 
Mass while twelve hundred musicians played military 
music. And all round, in the free space between the 
altar and the amphitheatre, moved the fourteen thou- 
sand Volunteers beneath their innumerable banners. 
In front of the altar, for the King, was placed a solitary 
throne. The Queen, the royal family, the National 
Assembly were seated on a Grand Stand. The Mass 
over, forty cannon voiced their hoarse reverberation. 
The King rose; he and the Nation swore their solemn 
covenant. All day it had rained, but at that solemn 
moment the sun came out in a sudden ray. Countless 
voices, in a paroxysm of hope and enthusiasm, sent up 
the cry: "Long live the Citizen-King!" The delegates 
of Touraine presented Louis with a ring that had 
belonged to Henri Quatre. In that moment, the vision 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 19;^ 

of a monarchy renewed — a popular and prosperous 
reign — dazzled the eyes of the prisoner of the people. 
The Queen herself forgot her cold and arrogant hos- 
tility. She sprang forward, lifting her little boy in her 
arms : ' ' Here is my son ! He and I share all the feelings 
of the King!" 

"Tous generalement sont ivres d' amour pour le Roi 
et la famille royale, ' ' wrote a spectator two days later. 
But alas ! even in that hour of enthusiasm, a rift in the 
ground, which was soon to become a yawning chasm, 
divided the King and the Country. 

The principal reason of the Revolution had, after 
all, been financial. The King had summoned the 
States- General in order to avert imminent bankruptcy, 
and, so far, they had bestowed on the country, not 
prosperity, but the promise of liberty for all and 
equality before the law, magnificent gifts, but perfectly 
compatible, it seemed, with ruin. The unjust and 
unequal pressure of taxes had been removed — with the 
result that the country was poorer than ever. The 
emigration of the aristocracy had in a great measure 
dried up one possible source of wealth. Another 
remained: the Church possessed one-fifth of the entire 
national territory. 

The Assembly, with ruin staring them in the face, 
proposed nothing less than to confiscate the estates 
of the Church, undertaking in exchange to distribute a 
suitable pension to priests and Bishops and to maintain 
their establishments for the relief of the poor. In the 
first enthusiasm of the Revolution, all ranks of the 
Church were not entirely opposed to this measure; the 
forfeiture of the Church lands, compensated by regular 
salaries, was to be a levelling measure, mulcting 
heavily the great ecclesiastical lords and rich abbots, 



194 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

but bringing ease and relief from care to many a poor 
parish presbytery and village convent. 

The fortune of the Church had long tempted the 
needy governments of France. It was no revolution- 
ary, for it was Louis Quatorze, who wrote in his 
Memoirs : ' ' Les rois sont seigneurs absolus . . . de tous 
les biens, tant des seculiers que des ecclesiastiques, 
pour en user comme sages economies selon les besoins 
del'Etat. " It is a theory which the Revolution was 
to adopt and expand — its first requisition — and the 
Church was not to be alone in learning that any 
form of absolute Unity implies confiscation of private 
property. 

The State, then, declared the Church lands forfeit 
to the country. . . . But who, in that hour of need 
and upheaval, would purchase these great estates? 
Who woiild consent to despoil Mother Church, on 
his own responsibility? The Government decided 
on a plan, ingenious enough, though in the end it 
almost ruined France. The State decided to use this 
vast mass of property as the guarantee for an emission 
of paper money. Each bank-bill was, so to speak, a 
plot of ground, and might at any time be exchanged for 
it. Here was no bubble scheme — no South-Sea figment 
— but solid property, so much vineyard, or meadow, or 
cornland, which a man might go and see, on which he 
held a sort of mortgage or preference share. The towns 
subscribed for immense quantities of these "assignats,'' 
as they were called (because they were assigned on a 
given piece of land) — four hundred million francs' 
worth of them were set in circulation. 

At first all went merrily as a marriage-bell; the 
country appeared to emerge at last from the slough 
of poverty. The notes were popular; they seemed to 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 195 

have a double guarantee — that of the municipalities, 
and that of the real estate behind them. And all 
would have been well, perhaps, had the Government 
known moderation; but in the space of seven years it 
issued bank-bills to the amount of forty-five milliards 
of francs, of which not one tenth part was covered 
by the Church lands, and the assignats lost ninety-nine 
per cent, of their value. In 1796 a bill for a hundred 
francs, accepted in the spring of 1790 for its full worth 
in gold, had fallen to the ridiculous equivalent of 
fifty centimes in silver. And an inextricable system of 
brokerage and stock- jobbing absorbed the energies of 
French finance. 

This is glancing ahead. In 1790 the forfeiture of 
the Church lands seemed an issue from the dreary 
maze of national debt, violent indeed and unjust, 
yet which the conciliatory Pope, Pius VI, might have 
been brought to accept (if any one had taken the pains 
to conciliate him), since in fact it was on this selfsame 
basis that the Concordat was founded in 1801 between 
his successor and Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul. 
But that sectarian fury which has so often misled 
France led the Government to attack Rome not only 
in her material possessions but in her spiritual privileges. 
Without approaching the Vatican, the Revolution 
reconstructed the inconvenient, unequal dioceses of 
France into eighty-three brand-new bishoprics to suit 
the eighty-three new departments, and decreed a Civil 
Constitution of the Clergy which made the State, not 
the Pope, the Head of the Church. And the priests, as 
civil functionaries of the State, were ordered to take 
an oath of allegiance. 

A day was set apart for the solemn vow. But, to 
the surprise — indeed, the secret consternation — of the 



196 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

Government, nearly all the bishops and more than 
half the clergy refused to bow down the knee in the 
House of Rimmon. They awaited, they said, the 
decision of the Pope, to whom they had appealed. 
But the most painful dilemma of all was the King's. 
Louis was a strict Catholic. He was not, like the Queen, 
essentially hostile to the Revolution and all its works. 
Bred and born in the theory of autocracy, he was 
nevertheless intermittently haunted by the idea that, 
like Henri Quatre, he might one day reign over a 
happier France renewed, which should issue, as from a 
lustral bath, from years of discord and distress. He 
really admired the great undertakings of the Con- 
stituent Assembly : the creation of the departments, the 
unification of law, the abolition of feudal privilege. 
Louis had a long head for detail, much good sense, a 
certain administrative capacity, and a unique ex- 
perience of the difficulties of government. He was 
not, like Marie- Antoinette, a creature of instincts and 
prejudices. He really desired at any rate at this 
moment, to collaborate with the Assembly. But he 
was a devout and loyal Catholic far more profoundly 
than he was a Constitutional King. He dared not 
sanction what appeared to him a sacrilege, an abjura- 
tion. Neither dared he exercise his nominal right of 
veto. He wrote to Pius VI imploring his assistance and 
indulgence. He sought to gain time. But ministers 
bade him not to resist the will of the sovereign people. 
But the Assembly harassed and harried him to pro- 
mulgate the thrice-odious law. And the Pope reserved 
his answer. And finally, after a month's hesitation, 
the reluctant King, on the 26th of December, 1790, 
most weakly gave his consent to the decree and to the 
Civil Constitution of the Clergy. 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 197 

Three months later the Pope solemnly repudiated 
the law. Many of the clergy who had so far conformed 
resisted now and were suspended from their functions 
and emoluments. In front of these heroic non-jurors, 
the poor King felt the remorse of Peter. He fell ill 
with remorse and nervous fatigue. "I had rather be 
King of Metz!" he declared to his wife's friend, Fer- 
sen; "but this state of things cannot go on much 
longer." The ''Roi Tres Chretien'' felt himself a 
schismatic. His ostensible chaplain was a conforming 
priest; Louis would not accept the Sacrament from his 
hands. Easter was at hand, and the question of the 
King's Communion became an affair of national, of 
European, importance: would he approach the altar 
with the friends or with the enemies of the Revolution? 
The unfortunate monarch hoped to escape to his 
palace at Saint-Cloud for an Easter holiday, and there 
make his peace with Heaven unobserved. 

But on the i8th of April, 1791, as the King and his 
family settled themselves in their royal coach, about 
noon, on a fine spring day, happily disposed for depar- 
ture, an extraordinary popular fermentation seethed in 
an instant all round the Tuileries. In vain La Fayette 
enjoined on his National Guards to clear the road; the 
soldiers joined the people, declaring the King should 
not pass. For an hour and three-quarters, there he 
sat, immovable, smiling, bland, while the Queen fumed 
at his side. At last La Fayette had to come, very 
hangdog, and tell the royal pair that they could not, 
with any hope of safety, leave the palace. "They won't 
let me go?" said Louis. "Eh? They won't let me go? 
Well, then, I must stay!" and he repeated three times 
this sentence, murmuring that it was strange that, 
having given liberty to France, he should not himself 



198 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

be free. The Queen turned her blazing eyes on La 
Fayette: "At least now you will admit that we are 
prisoners!" she exclaimed. 

That evening she sent a secret message to her 
brother, the Emperor; and from that hour Louis 
listened to the plans of escape which the Queen was 
constantly preparing. He considered himself a captive, 
in durance vile, and, as such, released from the obliga- 
tion of sincerity, A consent wrung by coercion is not 
binding. Only, Louis was too prodigal of his acquies- 
cence. When, for instance, on the very morrow of this 
scene, he surprised the Assembly by a friendly call in 
which he assured the deputies of his determination to 
maintain the Constitution, "including the Civil Con- 
stitution of the Clergy, " it is impossible to acquit the 
King of a natural turn for double dealing. 

That very Easter (April, 1791) the Pope for the 
second time rejected the proposed reform of the Church, 
the creation of new bishoprics, the dissolution of monas- 
teries, the confiscation of Church lands, and the suprem- 
acy of the State. Great was the fury of the leaders of 
the Revolution. The Government revenged itself on 
its unhappy hostage, Louis Seize. They insisted that 
he should confess himself to a conforming priest: he 
confessed; that on Easter Day he should receive the 
Sacrament at those desecrated hands: and he ap- 
proached the Holy Table. They told him to write 
to all the courts in Europe stating that he was under 
no constraint: and he assured the sovereigns of his 
liberty (though doubtless he sent other letters by other 
ways). The King, bland, acquiescent, appeared dazed, 
fallen into his second childhood. 

But his mind was really busy working out a plan 
of escape. He saw all the difficulties of the situation. 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 199 

Unlike the Queen — so much more a Queen than a 
Frenchwoman — unHke his Austrian wife, Louis did 
not desire the armed intervention of Austria and Prus- 
sia. He remembered Poland, and he was quite 
aware that any foreign army would require its price 
in the form of territory. He distrUvSted Austria, 
Prussia, Russia, and England most of all. He distrusted 
his brothers. He knew that the emigres meant to 
declare him incapable of reigning, to proclaim his son 
under the Regency of Monsieur. He was therefore 
really averse to a foreign invasion. That was the 
forlorn hope, the last, grimmest expedient of the 
desperate. On the other hand, Louis could no longer 
endure his prison of Paris, where neither his life, his 
family, nor his conscience was in safety. ' ' I had rather 
be King of Metz!" he had said to Count Fersen. And 
his project was precisely to escape to Metz, where the 
army grouped on the eastern frontier under the com- 
mand of the Marquis de Bouille was supposed to be 
still devoted to the Crown. Surrounded by these faith- 
ful troops he would march on Paris. And without need 
of any Austrians or Prussians at his heels would make 
peace with his rebellious subjects generously, mag- 
nanimously, cL la Henri Quatre: ' ' Revenez a votre Roi ! 
II sera toujours votre pere, votre meilleur ami: quel 
plaisir n'aura-t-il pas a oublier toutes ses injures per- 
sonnelles, et de se revoir au milieu de vous, lorqu'une 
constitution, qu'il aura librement acceptee, fera que 
notre sainte religion sera respectee!" exclaims Louis in 
the extraordinary farrago of puerility, shrewish re- 
crimination, justice, and common sense which he left 
behind him — pinned, so to speak, to his pincushion 
in the form of a letter addressed to all Frenchmen — on 
the night of his escape. 



200 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

For on the night of June the 20th (1791), in the 
disguise of an upper servant, a sort of steward, the 
King passed through the gates of the Tuileries. The 
Queen left separately; she had been out in the town all 
afternoon, and, about seven o'clock, had come home 
very ostensibly, holding her little boy by the hand. 
Now, having changed her summer gown for a sober 
travelling-dress, she found herself alone in the streets 
at night, free, as she thought; and, in her high, glad 
spirits, finding herself, as she crossed the Carrousel, 
face to face with the carriage of La Fayette, she 
gave the wheels a little derisive flick with a light 
cane that she carried in her hand : she could not endure 
La Fayette! That was the final flare of the Queen's 
gaiety. . . . 

Meanwhile the Dauphin and his governess, with 
Madame Elisabeth and her niece the Princess Royal, 
escaping separately, joined the King and Queen at the 
comer of the rue de I'Echelle and entered with them a 
very large, roomy travelling-carriage provided by Count 
Fersen, who himself mounted the box as coachman for 
the first stage or so. They journeyed all night long 
and all the next day towards Bouille's army at Mont- 
medy, but at Sainte-Menehould, in the Argonne, they 
were recognized by the postmaster, who rode on and 
outran the King's carriage. 

Somehow they missed the reconnaissances which 
the army at Montmedy was sending out to meet and 
escort them. And the postmaster rode on. And so at 
Varennes they heard the tramp of galloping horses, 
the cries of pursuit, and found the bridge barricaded 
by a hay-cart turned sideways across it. Next came 
the enforced halt at the shop of the village mayor, 
Sauce the grocer; and poor, proud, passionate Marie- 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 201 

Antoinette's imploring and beseeching of Madame 
Sauce to further their escape: 

"He is your King and my husband!" cried the 
Queen, seated between two bundles of tallow candles, 
in the store-room, upstairs. 

''Que voulez-vous, madame?" says Madame Sauce. 
"Your situation is much to be deplored; but M. Sauce 
woiild pay the penalty if he let you go. They would 
cut off his head ! A woman must think of her husband !" 

And again the poor Queen "dans une extreme agita- 
tion" began explaining that that was precisely her 
case — that the King's life was not safe in Paris — when 
La Fayette's emissary rode up, followed by three 
Members of the Assembly, to escort the King and his 
family back to Paris. 

Perhaps even then they might have got away, for a 
party of Bouille's hussars came galloping up at last, 
and though their loyalty was more than questionable, 
still the habit of discipline and the love of a fight might 
have carried the day, but Louis' hatred of bloodshed 
was too strong to run the risk : 

"Will it be hot?" he said to Major Goguelat, his 
amateiu" courier. 

"Very hot," replied that truthful gentleman. And 
the King determined to try another way. In one of 
those inexplicable effusions which, in him, were always 
the sign of a tremendous inward tension, he approached 
his captors, and, throwing himself in the arms of the 
chief of them, he exclaimed: 

"Yes, I am your King! Placed in the capital in the 
midst of poignards and bayonets, I have come here, in 
the provinces, to seek among you the peace and liberty 
you all enjoy! I cannot stay in Paris without risking 
death for myself and my family." 



202 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

And as he pronounced these words, the King em- 
braced, one after the other, all the astonished persons 
present. 

Meanwhile, upstairs the ladies of the party tried 
by every wile, including simulated illness, to delay 
the moment of departure, hoping for the arrival of 
further troops from Montmedy. The King fell asleep, 
and on waking said he would go in peace, but to Mont- 
medy, not to Paris. He should have held out a little 
longer. Repacked at last in their travelling-coach, in 
company with two of the deputies from Paris, the 
royal party had scarcely turned their sad, reluctant 
faces towards the capital, their carriage was still 
rimibling among the vineyards of Varennes, when in 
the distance the townspeople descried a strong detach- 
ment of the regiment called Royal-AUemand hurrying 
to the King's relief. But they were too late. 

Even in that hour of disenchantment and despair 
— an hour (or rather a day) which turned her abundant 
blonde hair snow-white, "'comme les cheveux d'une 
femme de soixante-dix ans" — Marie-Antoinette dis- 
covered a new resource: she would make to herself 
friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness! On those 
two days of their enforced return to Paris, the captive 
Queen gave forth such an effluence of character and 
courage, of disinterested zeal for the public welfare, of 
enterprise and capacity, that (being a very graceful and 
lovely woman, and, into the bargain, a Queen to the 
tips of her fingers) she ended by capturing one of her 
captors and persuaded him to espouse the cause of the 
constitutional monarchy. 

He was a young Protestant from Grenoble, named 
Bamave — the very type of those gifted and cultured 
young men of the middle class whom the blocking of all 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 203 

advancement had forced into the Revolution. Al- 
though a Revolutionary, he was a monarchist: a 
Jacobin who fain would have made the King walk 
between the shafts while the Club held the whip. 
At first, when the Queen spoke to him, he turned aside 
on principle and looked out of the carriage window. 
But she soon brought him to see the error of his ways, 
and before they entered Paris, he was her knight, no 
less than Fersen. So much courage (he wrote one day) 
in such misfortune had engraved an ineffaceable im- 
pression on his heart. 

Barnave was sincere. As for the Queen, she certainly 
felt the charm of the eloquent, high-minded, chivalrous 
young deputy: '' Si jamais la puissance revient dans nos 
mains, le pardon de Barnave est d'avance ecrit dans nos 
cceurs" she exclaimed to Madame Campan, who more 
than once expresses in her Memoirs the astonishment 
with which she heard the Queen reiterate her high 
opinion of the Jacobin. And it is possible that, in her 
distress, Marie-Antoinette may have looked upon the 
Constitutionalists as a sort of second string to her bow — 
a possible protection against both emigres and Repub- 
licans. But her secret correspondence with Barnave 
and Fersen, which she placed in Fersen's hands, has 
lately been discovered in a castle in Sweden, and 
reveals her continual traffic with the Powers. If Marie- 
Antoinette in an hour of despair accepted the Constitu- 
tion and hoped by the aid of Barnave to secure for her 
feeble husband — and for her son — a popular throne, 
the throne of liberty and progress, that was but the 
illusion of a moment ; and Barnave was but a straw she 
clutched at with a drowning hand — like Mirabeau, 
like Danton, nay, even like La Fayette; for with all of 
these the Queen intrigued. . . . 



504 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

And all of them had an excellent opinion of her 
capacity. "The only man the King has to depend on is 
the Queen, " said Mirabeau. Bamave's letters are full 
of her character and courage. "The King is incapable 
of reigning [wrote La Marck]. The Queen might 
supply his incapacity if she could attend to affairs with 
method and perseverance, and instead of according a 
fragment of her trust to a variety of counsellors, bestow 
all her confidence on one adviser. " 

What gave a momentary consistency to the Queen's 
intrigues with Barnave was her hatred of the emigres 
and her distrust of the Great Powers. Her brother, the 
Emperor, had written to her, doubtless, or at least had 
let her understand (as he wrote quite plainly and 
freely to his ambassador in Petersburg), that he hoped 
to preserve the monarchy in France, but that the per- 
son of the King was quite indifferent to him : 

" I do not mind who sits upon the throne of France — 
whether it be Louis XVI, or Louis XVII, or Charles 
X, so as that throne be restored and the Monster of 
the Riding-school duly crushed. " 

The Monster was the National Assembly, which 
held its sessions in the Riding-school of the Tuileries, 
Pitt had replied in the same spirit. 

Both Louis and the Queen were well aware of these 
sentiments in their defenders outside the kingdom. 
Their endeavour was to steer a course clear of these 
false friends and of the growing party which demanded 
a republic. 

That was another result of the flight to Varennes. 
Until the King's escape there had been no serious 
thought of a French Republic; those whom the court 
called Republicans, like La Fayette, merely intended 
to reduce the King to the status of a hereditary Presi- 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 205 

dent. (A few fantastic journalists, such as Camille 
Desmoulins, are not a political party.) But the flight 
to Varennes had filled Paris with a sombre passion of 
contempt and indignation. Utter silence had greeted 
the return of the sovereigns. The crowds massed in the 
streets gave voice to neither word nor cry. Not a hat 
was raised, not a head was bowed, in salute. The 
National Guards, lining the roadway, held their arms 
reversed, as for a funeral. The Queen bent her shamed 
face almost down to her knees ; we know that the thick 
locks piled above it turned white during that journey. 
The King alone continued to smile and to treat the 
situation lightly, with his usual exasperating and 
tactless pleasantry. 

After that flight, the King had been suspended. 
In the manifesto which he had left behind him Louis 
had declared that he considered his past oaths enforced 
by constraint and not binding; in these conditions the 
Assembly could not trust him; and while it elaborated 
a new Constitution, which still might conciliate King 
and nation, Louis Seize was considered a State prisoner, 
without authority. The Assembly governed in its own 
name and kept the Great Seal in its own charge; no 
cataclysm followed (at least not immediately), and 
the people began to murmur "We can do without a 
king!" Leaders of the Assembly such as Brissot and 
Condorcet began a campaign against the "Royal 
Automaton." A fanatic doctor, named Marat, just 
then coming into note, declared in an extraordinary 
burst of prophecy (foreseeing Napoleon before he, so 
to speak, existed): "We want no king, but a military 
dictator. " Another party suggested offering the throne 
to the radical Duke of Orleans, who called himself 
Philippe Egalite. It was at that moment that the 



2o6 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

Queen in her despair sent to Barnave an appeal for 
help and counsel. Barnave, with his friends Lameth 
and Duport, ruled at that moment the Left of the 
Assembly. He declared, and he believed, that it was 
in his power to reseat the King on his throne, if the 
Queen would in all things follow his direction. He with 
his friends seceded from the Jacobin Club and inaugu- 
rated a new Constitutional Club — and a new Consti- 
tutional party — in the desecrated monastery of the 
Feuillants, or Bemardines, facing the Tuileries gardens. 
For some months — till the end of August — there seemed 
a chance that the Feuillants, as the new Club called itself, 
after all might save the monarchy. . . . 

"When I came back to Paris on the 25th of August 
[wrote Madame Campan], I found things much calmer 
than I could have dared to hope. Every one was 
talking of the King's acceptation of the Constitution, 
and of the public festivities to which that would give 
rise. The Queen began to hope in a happier order of 
events, though, on the 17th of July, she had passed 
some wretched hours, listening to the cannon thunder- 
ing on the Champ de Mars during the scuffle of the 
Constitutionalists with the Jacobins who demanded 
that the King should be tried and judged. " 

On that occasion the Constitutionalists had come 
off best, and La Fayette, by shooting down a sufficient 
number of the insurgents, had almost provoked a 
Royalist reaction. In September the King accepted 
the Constitution and was greeted by the populace with 
shouts of gratitude and joy. The word on all lips 
was: "The Revolution is now at an end!" ... But 
revolutions never know where to stop. They advance 
in great waves, each billow different from and deeper 
than the last. After the acceptation of the Constitu- 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 207 

tion, the Constituent Assembly had been dissolved — 
or rather had dissolved itself — with the proviso that 
none of its members might be elected to the new 
Chamber. The elections therefore brought into power 
and place an entirely new set of deputies and officials, 
men of no experience of the great world of affairs and 
generally recruited from a much lower class of the 
population. Those cultured and gifted " Quatrevingt- 
neuvistes" — those men of '89 — who hitherto have held 
the scene, give place to a class, fanatic and illiterate, 
which, unhappily, is not to be the last. A third wave 
will bring to the surface the terrible dregs of anarchy. 

The Legislative Assembly met on the ist of October, 
1 79 1. Almost its first act was to declare all the emigres 
suspect, to summon them to return to France before 
the ensuing New Year's Day (ist of January, 1792), 
and, in case of contumacy, to confiscate their estates 
and possessions and to sentence them to death. As 
for the priests (forty-two thousand of them were 
"refractory"), they were enjoined to lose no time in 
swearing allegiance to the State as Head of the Church ; 
otherwise they would be considered rebels, and as such 
liable to instant arrest and imprisonment. . . . When 
these decrees were presented to the King, he fell into 
a state of almost demented melancholy. For ten days 
he pronounced no word, even to his family. Perhaps, 
in his dejection, he might have given his sanction 
to these hated laws, for he foresaw the results of his 
refusal. But Marie-Antoinette insisted on the veto, 
flinging herself at her husband's feet in tragic scenes of 
entreaty, "era employ ant tantot des images faites pour 
Veffrayer, tantot les expressions de sa tendresse pour lui, " 
as Madame Campan tells us, having witnessed her heart- 
rending appeal. 



2o8 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

For six months the King hesitated, procrastinated, 
torn between his Queen and his counsellors, until with 
either party he lost all credit. At first his "J'examin- 
erai'' had been received with the respect due to the 
decision of the responsible head of a State. But 
while Louis continued to hesitate the nation was mov- 
ing violently; they soon lost contact. In the spring 
of 1792 the Girondin Ministry required the King, as 
the Executive Power of the People, to declare war 
upon Austria. No measure could be more wounding 
to the court. The Queen was an Austrian Princess; 
her marriage had been made to cement an Austrian 
alliance; and even at that hour Austria, though in 
arms, was still officially the ally of France. 

"Tant mieux!" cried the Queen, who had reached 
the last paroxysm of exasperation. But Louis, when 
he declared war, could not see the paper in his hands 
for the tears in his eyes. He considered his crown the 
victim of two opposing forces : the extremists at home 
and the invading emigres. 

The war was popular with the nation, which for 
so many centuries had hated Austria; the alliance 
had never sunk in, so to speak, much deeper than the 
sphere of the court. But the war was another reason 
for resenting the influence of V Autrichienne. The 
campaign began with grave reverses for the French; 
defeats, panics, routs. Nothing in these first dis- 
astrous battles presaged the glorious campaigns of 
the RepubHc. The troops were ill-prepared and inex- 
perienced; in many regiments the officers, all noble, 
had deserted en masse to join the ranks of the return- 
ing absentees. (And that is how a young Corsican 
lieutenant in the regiment of La Fere, one Napoleon 
Buonaparte, found himself unexpectedly a captain.) 



ITHE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 209 

These were excuses for defeat, but the pubHc did not 
accept them, and awaited the march of the Austrians 
on Paris in a mood of increasing exasperation. 

On the 15th of June the King affirmed his veto; 
and the pubHc thought him bolder because of the 
Austrian advance; there were howls of wrath against 
"Monsieur et Madame Veto." On the 20th the mob 
invaded the Tuileries; the King and Queen were in- 
sulted, their lives in danger. The populace, armed 
with bill-hooks and pikestaves, poured through the 
palace crying: "Recall the Veto! Recall the Veto! 
You have deceived us once; take care lest you deceive 
us again! " It was, says Hue, the King's faithful valet, 
"a walking forest of pikes." As on all occasions when 
courage means calm endurance rather than enterprise 
or dashing bravery, Louis showed the most remarkable 
valour. Hour followed hour: "Sanction the decrees! 
Choose between us and the emigres! Banish the 
priests!" shrieked the insurgents. The King, with 
a quiet smile, replied that this was not the moment 
to examine the decrees, and that he saw nothing to 
make him change his opinion. And then, with that 
excessive effusion to which he was liable in such times 
of storm and stress, he added: "I, too, am a patriot!" 
and seizing the red cap of Liberty on the head of one 
of his assailants, he donned it himself. There was a 
moment of stupor. The fat pale King must have 
appeared an extraordinary spectacle — his dress dis- 
ordered, half the powder shaken out of his hair, with 
that Phrygian cap tossing above his shy, awkward 
smile, as he stood in front of the excited mob, jogging 
the weight of his great body alternately from one foot 
on to the other, as was his wont. It was horribly hot, 
as it often is in Paris at midsummer; some one pro- 
14 



210 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

duced a bottle of common "blue" wine and a glass. 
The "patriots" quenched their thirst, and then, some- 
one handing the glass to Louis, he drank too. 

When at six o'clock the Mayor at last arrived (it 
was Petion, one of the two deputies who had fetched 
the royal family from Varennes) — when Petion, then, 
turned up, Jestina lente, and doubtless hoping to find 
the King's head on a pike, the mob was good-naturedly 
roaring: "Le Roi boitF'— ''The King drinks! "as they 
cry on Twelfth Night when the reveller who finds the 
bean in his piece of cake has to pay a glass all round 
to the rest of the party. 

In fine, the King's good-humour, his unusual firm- 
ness too (for not a jot did he yield in all that day), 
together with the patience and grace displayed by the 
Queen and Madame Elisabeth (who had had their 
own attack to sustain), increased rather than di- 
minished the chances of the Constitutionalists, The 
extreme demagogues looked on in dismay. The experi- 
ment had missed fire — a mere flash in the pan. One 
Danton, a lawyer turned politician, whose criminal 
genius stuck at no scruple, resolved that he would 
try again. Danton believed, with a passionate con- 
viction, that the welfare of France required the down- 
fall of the King, and, by fair means or foul, he meant 
to compass it. How could the King conduct a war 
against the very Powers who were hurrying to his 
defence? After the 20th of June the Tuileries seemed 
far more powerful than they had been before. So 
Danton arranged, for the loth of August, the final 
crash. 

Danton, the Titan, the giant of the Revolution, was 
a man beyond the bounds of good and evil; a crime 
did not frighten him, however inhuman (as we shall see 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 211 

in September), if he thought it for the public good. 
He liked to think that he was a sort of surgeon who, 
cutting off the gangrened limb, saved the endangered 
body. The raison d'etat appeared to him a higher 
morality which exonerated all excess. 

Whatever the obliquity of his moral sense, his men- 
tal glance was piercing and direct. Louis was in secret 
correspondence with the Kings of Spain, of Sweden, 
with Catherine of Russia, with Leopold of Austria, as 
to the best manner "^oj^r arrtter les factieux.'" The 
Queen, especially, was constantly in touch with the 
enemies of France. On the 21st of June we find her 
writing to Fersen : 

"Do not be too anxious about me. Believe that 
courage always commands respect. Our last expe- 
dient will ensure us time enough for them to come and 
save us. But what long weeks they will be! I dare 
not write more. Adieu. Hasten, if you can, the 
help that is promised for our deliverance." 

And she adds in sympathetic ink : 

"I am still alive. But it's a miracle. The 20th 
was an awful day." 

A few days later, on the 3rd of July, the Queen found 
means to send another note : 

"Our position is terrible. But I feel quite brave. 
Do not be too anxious. Something within me tells 
me that we shall be delivered." 

"Tai en moi quelque chose qui me dit que nous serons 
sauves'' She repeats the words to Madame Campan. 
On one of those July nights, while the moonlight flooded 
her bedchamber, she said to her faithful friend and 
follower: "Next month the moon will shine upon me 
free, and the King disengaged from all his chains!" 

"And she said she was acquainted with the itinerary 



212 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

of the Prussian advance, and the line of march fol- 
lowed by the French princes. ... On such and such 
a day they would be at Verdun, they were about 
to besiege Lille ; she knew all their stages. . . . But 
she was anxious about what might happen in Paris 
during the interval. She spoke of the King's lack of 
energy: 'The King is no coward; he has plenty of 
passive courage, but he is weighed down by shyness 
and a strange self-diffidence. He does not know how 
to command, and the right word does not come readily 
to his lips. ... As for me, I should love to act, jump 
on a horse, and ride!' " 

Meanwhile Austrians, Prussians, emigres, were cross- 
ing the frontier. The fury of the French became 
more and more alarming and perfectly comprehensible. 
(Write Petrograd for Paris, and we of 191 8 under- 
stand the situation at one glance.) La Fayette hur- 
ried to Paris in the hope of aiding the escape of the 
sovereigns. "Better die [cried Marie- Antoinette] than 
be saved by M. de La Fayette!" She still hoped, 
poor lady, to be saved by the Duke of Brunswick. 
Brunswick, with his German faith in the efficacy of 
Terror, warned the Parisians that not one stone of 
their city should be left upon another if so much as 
a hair of King or Queen were harmed. The threat 
inflamed to madness the excitable blood of the Celts 
and the French defeats served to fan the fever. The 
drums beat in the streets; the great black flag stream- 
ing from the towers of Notre-Dame proclaimed the 
country in danger; stands were erected on the public 
places, and on these scaffoldings a registrar with his 
ledger took down the names of the recruits, young and 
old, of every class, who volunteered for military ser- 
vice. . . . 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 213 

"You must wait ten days before Brunswick can be 
in France," wrote Fersen to the Queen. . . . 

The time seemed intolerably long. "I wish they 
would put us in a tower," said the Queen to Madame 
Campan; "in a tower by the side of the sea." She 
had once said much the same to Danton: "You should 
put us in a tower for three months and forget us." 

And they were soon to put her in a tower. 

The evening of the 9th of August was stifling; all 
Paris was in the streets. One of those mysterious 
rumours which rise in a crowd like a ground-swell 
passed from lip to lip: "Something is going to hap- 
pen!" At a quarter to twelve the great bell of the 
Cordeliers (the Franciscan convent where Danton 
presided over the demagogic Club) rang out in great 
heavy, isolated notes; six churches in the neighbour- 
hood responded in the same impressive dreary toll. 
It was the tocsin. 

It was Danton in person who had set the bell-ringers 
to work. Then he passed to the Town Hall, deposed 
the Town Council, and installed the new Commune 
of Paris: the ^^ Commune insurrectionnelle" whose 
very name is the programme of a riot. And the attack 
on the Tuileries was decided. 

If Danton had found in front of him another Danton, 
there yet might have been a chance in the King's 
favour: at least, a famous tug-of-war; at worst, a 
chance to perish gloriously. But we know the timid, 
undecided character of the King; his horror of blood- 
shed. If we count the Swiss Guards and the gen- 
darmerie of the suburbs, summoned in haste to Paris 
and massed in the Tuileries in anticipation of an attack; 
if we count also the Royalist gentlemen who, on learn- 
ing the King's danger, flocked to the palace summarily 



214 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

armed with anything they could catch: rifles, pistols, 
swords, rapiers, daggers, and even, when cold steel 
and fire-arms failed, fire-irons (Madame Campan 
noticed two brave defenders wielding a poker and tongs) 
— taking, then, stock of all, the King must have 
counted close on two thousand defenders; but half of 
the gendarmes were secretly Jacobins at heart. At 
dawn Louis passed them in review. He had no flash 
of the gay, adventurous, martial spirit which might 
have lit an electric spark and unified the mass. Mute, 
preoccupied, dull, and apparently only half awake, he 
passed in front of them, as pale as death, repeating 
parrot-like, in front of every company: "Taime la 
garde nationale." So that, a little later, his artillery 
joined the insurgents. The Queen still preached re- 
sistance; Louis thought it hopeless. And the royal 
family, headed by the King, took refuge in the National 
Assembly, which was sitting in the monastery of the 
Feuillants, situate opposite the Tuileries gardens, on 
the site now occupied by the rue de Rivoli between 
the rue de Castiglione and the rue Saint -Roch. As 
they passed along the terrace in a storm of insult and 
derision, they looked for the last time on the palace 
and gardens of the kings of France. That night they 
were housed in a cell of the monastery, sleeping on 
casual shakedowns in the miserable little room with 
its damp green wallpaper. On the morrow they were 
removed, first to the Luxembourg, then to that great 
four-squared turreted mediaeval Donjon of the Temple, 
which, since the destruction of the Bastille, did duty in 
Paris for a State Prison. For a few days longer they 
were nominally King and Queen in their captivity. 
But on the 20th of September the new Assembly met, 
under the name of the National Convention, and 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 215 

declared that there should be no more kings in France, 
but a Republic, one and indivisible. 

The monarchy had fallen. The new order decreed 
that there should be no more kings ! 

Yet, on the loth of August, when Louis XVI, with 
his wife and children, was hurrying, pale, dishevelled, 
along the terrace of the Feuillants to that refuge which 
was but to prove a waiting-room for the scaffold, the 
King's flight had excited the surprise and contempt 
of a young artillery officer in the crowd. ' ' Che cogltonef ' 
("What a dolt!"), cried the captain Napoleon Buona- 
parte (the words still naturally rose to his lips in 
Italian), who certainly, in the King's place, would not 
have abandoned his solid regiments of Swiss. At 
that date he did not imagine that the day should 
dawn when he would speak more tenderly of "my late 
uncle. King Louis XVI"; still less that another French 
palace should witness his own abdication. . . . 

The monarchy had fallen. 

The fall of Louis XVI did not greatly depress the 
King's brother. Monsieur, invading with the Prussian 
army the frontiers of the north-east. Farther than 
those limits he will not get for another score of years 
and more; when he, in his turn, shall wear the crown 
as Louis XVIII, and, sole of all the sovereigns of 
France since Louis XV, resign it only on his death- 
bed. 

The monarchy had fallen. 

A handsome, empty-pated, ignorant, obstinate, 
frivolous, but not ungenerous prince is hastening 
from court to court, in the attempt to organize a 
Revanche. He thinks, doubtless, of his old crony and 
confederate, Marie-Antoinette, and his bigoted but 
chivalrous heart is full of plans of vengeance. He 



2i6 THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY 

will not save her nor the Dauphin. A belated Perseus, 
he will see the Monster of the Riding-school devour 
her and her little son, before he can snatch from that 
doom the young Princess of France, petrified by mis- 
fortune into a statue of sad remembrance. We shall 
meet our prince again, thirty years later, as Charles 
X, King for half a dozen years ere he go out again 
into exile at Holyrood or Goeritz. 

For again the monarchy shall fall. 

Another young prince learned in that fateful August, 
with a surprise not wholly unmixed with approval, 
that the monarchy had fallen in France. This was 
the heir of Orleans, the son of Philippe-Egalite, the 
great-great-grandson of the Regent, the pupil of 
Madame de Genlis — that young Duke of Chartres 
who was, at that time, the model, the Prince Charming, 
of all Europe. Brave, gifted, accomplished, liberal, 
and rich, with an army of politicians scheming in his 
favour, the young colonel, of dragoons in Dumouriez's 
army appeared infinitely more favoured by fortune 
than the Corsican artillery captain. But Napoleon 
and the Restoration will make him wait his turn. 
Not until 1830 will Louis-Philippe ascend the throne 
of France. And he too, in his turn, shall abdicate 
and die in exile. 

The monarchy in France has fallen. . . . And it 
shall fall many a time again ! 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

A. Sorel: U Europe et la Revolution, t. i., ii. 
Aulard: La Societe des Jacobins. 
Taine: La Revolution. 

Legg: Select Documents of the French Revolution. 
O.-G. de Heidenstam: Marie- Antoinette, Fersen, et Barnave. 
Sainte-Beuve : Barnave, Mirabeau, Marie- Antoinette {Causeries 
du Lundi). 



THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 217 

Madame Campan: Memoires sur la Vie de Marie-Antoinette. 

L. Madelin: La Revolution. 

Len6tre: Le Drame de Varennes. 

Albert Malet: XVIIP Siecle, Revolution, Empire. 

Michelet: Histoire de la Revolution Frangaise. 

Mignet: La Revolution Frangaise. 

Emile Dard: Le General Choderlos de Laclos. 

Marquis de S6gur: Au Couchant de la Monarchic. 



PART IV 
THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 



219 



CHAPTER I 
THE REIGN OF TERROR 

To the monarchy succeeded the Republic. 

Seldom has any government come into being in 
such a tragic hour. The Prussians were before Ver- 
dun and Longwy; the Austrians were laying siege to 
Lille; the French army was wholly disorganized — the 
soldiers in a large proportion uninstructed volunteers; 
in many regiments the officers had deserted to join 
the invading forces hastening to the relief of the 
King. The Republic, it is true, possessed several 
brilliant generals: Dumouriez, Pichegru, Moreau; but 
she was not sure of their loyalty, and, as a matter of 
fact, these great captains were all to pass into the 
ranks of her enemies. Such as it was, the army was 
cruelly hampered by the shortage of provisions and 
munitions. ... As for the country — the principles 
of the provinces were stiU an unknown quantity: 
the South and West were suspected of Royalism; 
and Paris, which had invented the Republic, was 
torn between two parties whose clash and conflict 
might at any moment strike out the flame of civil war. 

After the fall of the monarchy the Constitution of 
1790 was naturally good for nothing. A new Assembly, 
the Legislative, was to meet in the autumn in order 
to elaborate a republican code. During the two 

221 



222 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

months of interregnum, although the ministers in 
office were chiefly Girondins, with every week the 
opposition gained a greater power. 

The men of the moment were the deputies of the 
Extreme Left: the ultra-democrats, backed by the 
Clubs (Jacobin and Cordelier) and the terrible agita- 
tors of the Commune. Despite many rancours and 
rivalries, they were united by one great article of 
faith which they all held in common: the supremacy 
of Paris. Paris was the natural King of France in 
the eyes of the Mountain (the Left of the Chamber 
was known as the Mountain because the advanced 
parties sat at the summit of the amphitheatre which 
served for the sessions of the Assembly) . 

No theory was more repugnant to their opponents, 
"the deputies of Bordeaux": the Gironde. Roughly 
speaking, we may say that the Gironde represented 
the spirit of the provinces — especially the provinces 
of the South and the West. The Girondins were 
partisans of a Democratic, a Liberal, an "Athenian" 
Republic. They were opposed to any form of dicta- 
torship, but especially to the absolute sway of Paris: 
"Infernal Paris." Paris (they loved to say) is a de- 
partment, and, as such, has a right to an eighty-third 
share of power and influence; no more. Especially 
did they dread the reckless tyranny of the Commune. 
They were men of Aquitaine, enlightened, eloquent, 
without the grim earnestness and fierce inventiveness 
of their antagonists. These men of the Gironde — of 
Bordeaux (Bordeaux is the capital of the department 
of the Gironde) — were the natural adversaries of the 
men of the Moimtain, who were led by the deputies 
from Champagne and from Arras: Danton, Robes- 
pierre, Saint-Just. Each group was a nucleus round 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 223 

which gathered the representatives of the North, the 
elect of the South. Once more France was shaken 
and almost divided by their incompatibiHty. The 
members of the Gironde were the descendants of those 
learned, elegant rhetoricians and magistrates we have 
met in Ausonius' Burdigala. The deputies on the 
crest of the Mountain were those men of the North- 
east whom Caesar praised as the bravest, most daring, 
and most ferocious of the Gauls: "horum omnium 
fortissimi sunt Beiges.'* 

The Gironde was essentially Liberal and law-abiding. 
No less Republican than the Mountain and in some 
ways more extreme (the Gironde, not the Mountain, 
declared war on Austria), its activity was. politi- 
cal rather than social. The very cornerstone of the 
doctrines of the Gironde was the liberty of the indi- 
vidual. To them the rights of property were sacred. 
These Aquitanians, with their classic culture and their 
Latin quotations, with their love of local life and 
local colour, with their mingling of democratic prin- 
ciples and traditional prejudice, had voted conscien- 
tiously a change of government, without any presage 
of the wild, mad, topsy-turvy world into which that 
measure was to introduce them. They had hoped to 
achieve liberty and make no sacrifice. 

The men of the Mountain were a more deadly sort 
of theoricians; the Revolution was to them a faith 
— more than that: one of those terrible superstitions 
to which the Thugs, for instance, or the disciples of 
Juggernaut, are willing to immolate both enemies and 
friends. They, too, loved liberty; and yet were will- 
ing to sacrifice it to that dearer deity, Equality, or 
to that Holy of Holies, the Love of Country. But 
their patriotism, although intense, was narrow, and 



224 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

embraced only those Frenchmen who were of their 
opinion. Their ideal was an oligarchy of Jacobins — 
say some three hundred thousand of them — control- 
ling six or seven millions of Girondins, Feuillants, 
Royalists, or indifferents. I say Jacobins, for the 
Jacobins were to the Mountain what the Jesuits were 
to Rome: an incomparable organ of propaganda and 
defence. At first a mere Club, where the Breton 
members of the National Assembly used to meet at 
Versailles, the Society had moved its headquarters, 
to the desecrated convent of Whitefriars, or Jacobins, 
when the Assembly, in October '89, had followed the 
King to Paris. Here the whilom Breton Club, re- 
baptized Jacobin, became the very centre and focus 
of extreme democratic principles, with branches in all 
the towns, in many of the villages of France — some 
two thousand four hundred Societes populaires, estab- 
lished throughout the length and breadth of the Repub- 
lic, entrusted with the most various functions and 
duties. Their duty was to watch the conduct of citi- 
zens and public bodies; to send constant reports to 
the central Society ; to inspect and control the elections 
of local officials ; to keep an anxious eye on the sayings 
and doings of all suspected persons, such as nobles, 
priests, men of wealth or standing, political opponents 
of any sort; they were also employed in the exercise 
of charity, in relieving the necessities of widows 'and 
orphans; in redressing injustice; in discovering de- 
posits of saltpetre for the use of the armies: endless 
were the attributes of the Societes populaires; but the 
first and foremost was that of a perpetual and ubi- 
quitous Vigilance Committee, a vast society of revolu- 
tionary police. 
At the date which we have reached (1792) these 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 225 

societies, charged with the poHtical and moral super- 
vision of the whole French public, were not as yet 
recruited from the illiterate class. Neither were they 
as a rule men of the culture and tradition that marked 
the Girondins, but needy journalists, doctors with a 
bee in their bonnet (like Marat), priests with "views," 
briefless barristers, local shopkeepers enriched by the 
acquisition of "national estates": i. e., Church-lands 
or property confiscated by the Government on account 
of the emigration of the original owners; men of rest- 
less intelligence and enthusiastic principle, enchanted 
by their new importance; positive, able organizers 
whose quick suspicions and alert mistrust detected the 
least symptom of danger to the Republic and whose 
harsh patriotism punished without pity the least 
variation from the Tables of their Law. They were 
the Puritans of Liberty. 

The Jacobin Club in Paris was the oracle of the 
Convention; its endless ramifications implanted Paris 
like a thorn in the flesh of the most distant provinces. 
There came a time when "to calumniate Paris" was 
a crime punishable by death. Yet, odious as were 
the means they employed, they ensured unity of direc- 
tion, a central force and prompt action, in the hour of 
national danger. The Jacobins realized that Liberal 
traditions must be suspended during the tug-of-war. 
Let us recall the way they saved their country, and, 
if we cannot admire, we may excuse the greatness of 
their crimes and exclaim, with that fierce old Tory and 
Papist, J. de Maistre: 

" Le mouvement revolutionnaire une fois etabli 
... la France et la monarchic ne pouvait 6tre sau- 
vees que par le Jacobinisme. . . . Nos neveux, 
qui s'embarrasseront tres peu de nos souffrances et 

IS 



226 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

qui danseront sur nos tombeaux, riront de notre igno- 
rance actuelle et se consoleront aisement des exces 
que nous avons vus et qui auront conserve I'integrite 
du plus beau royaume" {Considerations sur la France, 
Lausanne, 1796). 

The Republic had stumbled to its seat through a 
mire of blood. After the fall of the monarchy Danton 
had assumed the direction of affairs by right of the 
natural predominance of energy and passion in a man 
who sees where he is going and knows what he means. 
He had no other right; he was simply Minister of 
Justice in a Girondin Ministry opposed to his views 
on most points of politics. But he was determined 
to save the Revolution. He was well aware that the 
country contained far more Constitutionalists, per- 
haps even more Royalists, than Republicans; the 
Republic, if it was to come into being, would be a 
creation of Paris; and a Republic seemed necessary 
to Danton, at any rate as a phase, in the interests of 
the Revolution. The imminent danger ahead was a 
Bourbon Restoration, a long Regency under Monsieur, 
or Artois; a return to the principles of Louis XV; 
and France dismembered in payment of the Allies, 
changed into a second Poland, with Flanders given to 
Austria and Lorraine to Prussia. This, at all risks, 
Danton was determined to avert. 

Paris was full of spies and conspirators — if we can 
give these names to Royalists who thought they had 
as good a right to their opinions as the Revolution 
to its own revolt; but they were men, at any rate, 
who were guilty of communicating with the invaders. 
Danton flung them into prison: the Swiss Guards 
who had defended the Tuileries; quantities of non- 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 227 

juring priests; nobles, aristocrats, and especially the 
fathers, mothers, wives, or children of emigres, con- 
sidered as hostages; several ex-ministers of Louis 
XVI were swept into the net. ... On the 28th 
of August, a house-to-house visitation of the police 
searched every drawer and every cupboard, sounded 
every panel, Hfted every hearthstone, inquired into 
every correspondence in the capital. Meanwhile, 
the gates of Paris were closed ; all communication with 
the country was stopped; Paris was a prisoner kept 
in close confinement. As a result of this inquisition, 
more than a thousand "suspects" were added to the 
immense body of political prisoners already confined 
in the jails and convents of the city. 

It is probable that few Royalists were left at large. 
But was not this huge phalanx of traitors dangerous, 
even behind its bolts and bars? Was not its captivity 
another incentive to the advance of those invaders 
who came to redress the wrongs of King and Queen? 
And, on the very eve of a General Election, was not 
this Royalist fermentation an encoiu-agement to the 
provinces, only too inclined to favour a reaction? 
Across the Channel, Burke at that time was crying 
to the King's party to steel their hearts to pity; he 
wrote: "Diffuse terror!" . . . But it was Danton 
who took his advice; it was Danton who said to the 
Assembly: "// faut faire peur aux Royalistes." It 
was Danton who said: "I looked my crime straight 
in the face — and I chose it!" 

Sunday, the 2nd of September, 1792, was a fine day: 
"Agreeable weather," notes Gouverneur Morris. But 
the sunshine looked black enough in Paris, for the 
news came that morning of the fall of Verdun. The 



228 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

Prussians were six days' march from the capital; 
Dumouriez with his army was on the front in the 
North; between the Prussians and Paris there was 
only Kellermann with his little army of volunteers. 

I would not for the world palliate the massacres 
of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th of September ; they, after 
the Saint-Bartholomew, are the deepest stain on the 
glorious robe of France. But we in our own days 
know the madness induced by spy-fever; and the 
political prisoners in the jails of Paris were reckoned 
as conspirators and spies. ... I would not say that 
Danton designed and ordered those massacres; but 
it is clear he did nothing to prevent them. "C'est 
moi qui ai tout fait,'' he said to the Duke of Chartres. 
''Que TvCimpoYte d'etre appele buveur de sang?" he cried 
to the Convention. "It was no popular movement, 
but a got up affair," wrote another demagogue, Robert 
Lindet. ... It is probable that the Commune set 
the riot in movement ; and Danton, Minister of Justice, 
moved no finger when the Commune's paid murderers 
broke into the prisons of Paris and in five days' steady 
work assassinated between twelve hundred and sixteen 
hundred political prisoners. For the thing suited his 
book; and probably they were spies. 

''Non ragionam di lor!" If every great movement 
has its good and its bad angel, then on the slopes of 
the Argonne a voluntary sacrifice attested the nobler 
spirit of the Revolution. On the little hill of Valmy, 
under their new tricolour flag, Kellermann's volun- 
teers in their wooden shoes and rough blue jackets 
rushed on the Prussians to the strains of the Mar- 
seillaise, shouting ''Vive la Nation!" They carried 
the day. When, on the following Saturday, the Re- 
public "one and indivisible" came legally into being 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 229 

with the vote of the New Assembly, the Prussian army 
in retreat had turned its banners towards the Rhine. 

■ The Austrians were still in the North; no peace 
had confirmed the retirement of the Prussians; and 
France was still on the verge of civil war, without 
an ally, without money or munitions, with an impro- 
vised army of ignorant volunteers. It was in these 
conditions that the Jacobins invented their splendid 
programme of reforms, which gave fourteen armies to 
the Republic and made France once more the first 
Great Power in Europe. 

They had to invent, to this end, a system of poHcy 
not only novel in itself, but in disaccord with all their 
dearest theories. They had to improvise, in the heat 
of battle, a centralized government which was the 
pure negation of the sovereignty of the people, the 
rights of man, and individual liberty; they had, in 
the words of Marat, "to oppose the despotism of free- 
dom to the despotism of kings." On the very morrow 
of Valmy, the Jacobins of Paris, confronted with the 
dire need of finding and furnishing an adequate armed 
force for the defence of the territory, struck out a new 
conception of property. 

In their eyes private wealth was no longer an in- 
tangible family heritage and personal satisfaction; it 
was, although entrusted to the temporary keeping of 
individuals, the last resource and the last reserve of 
the State, its forlorn hope, and, as such, always Hable 
to be required and requisitioned in any mortal ex- 
tremity of the nation. In time of war, and especially 
in case of invasion, not a drop of French blood, not a 
coin of French gold, could be esteemed private property. 
The country had a prior claim on all possessions. 



230 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

"Industry, counsel, fortune, labour, these are gifts 
that most of us can bestow; we all can give our blood. 
Let each of us be found at his post. Let the young 
men fight; let the fathers of families forget their arms 
and transport their ammunition, while the women 
sew their tents and their uniforms and nurse the 
wounded; the very children can make lint and fold a 
bandage! Henceforth our houses must all be bar- 
racks, our market-places workshops: the Republic is 
one great beleaguered city and all of France a military 
camp." Such were the measures proposed by Barrere 
(the translator of Young's Night Thoughts) in the name 
of the Committee of Public Safety. 

Almost the first act of the Convention was to put 
the King upon his trial. If a legitimate king can be 
guilty of high treason to his revolting subjects, I sup- 
pose that Louis XVI was guilty. It is certain that 
he had summoned the foreigner into France; that he 
intrigued against the Constitution he had accepted; 
but it was in defence of his life and his crown. 

From the first day of the trial it was clear that the 
Gironde desired to save the King. The Gironde was 
not, like the Mountain, a sect of fanatics with a 
dogma to enforce. The Mountain was a block. The 
Gironde was compact of many varieties in one opinion ; 
there were Constitutionalists and there were Repub- 
licans, but both alike upheld the earlier principles of 
the Revolution: the reverence for Justice, the cult of 
Law, the firm faith in the sovereignty of the People. 
The Constitution had declared the person of the King 
inviolable; therefore (said the Girondins), even if the 
King has done wrong, it is impossible to behead 
the King without consulting on so grave a subject the 
Sovereign People. They wished to go to the country, 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 231 

to gain time, and were certain that a referendum 
would support their views. But the criterion of the 
Mountain was not law nor principle; they considered 
the present safety of the country: the "Salut Public." 
It was expedient that one man should die for the 
people. They averred (and it is probable that they 
were right) that a referendum could only result in 
civil war. Their one chance, they thought, was to in- 
timidate Royalists and Constitutionalists aHke, to 
threaten the Gironde, to throw down the gauntlet to 
all the monarchs of Europe, and, by cutting off the 
head of a traitor-King— "Loww le Trattre," as Barrere 
called him— to place between France and her invaders 
an irreparable crime, an obstacle to any possible pact 
or peace. 

"You are not judges; you are, and can be, only 
statesmen"— " Vous n'etes point des juges, vous n'etes 
et ne pouvez etre que des hommes d'ttat" said Robes- 
pierre to the tribunal of the Convention. "Caesar 
was stabbed in the Senate, and two-and-twenty 
dagger thrusts were judged a sufficient formaHty," 
remarked Saint- Just. 

What the Mountain wished was a coup d'etat, 
boldly accepted, inspired by a poHtical necessity. 
The Mountain said, as Danton had said in September: 
"I looked my crime straight in the face— and I chose 
it!" 

This terrible doctrine of the Salut Public has always 
haunted the logical imagination of the French, and 
its apparitions have constantly heralded misfortune. 
The Saint-Bartholomew is the example that rises at 
once to one's mind, but there are earHer ones— such 
as the murder of the Knights-Templar under Philippe- 
le-Bel; and later ones— for instance, the Revocation 



232 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

of the Edict of Nantes ; last of all, there was the Drey- 
fus Affair. The raison d'etat has always been the bane 
of France. 

"We have to consider [said Robespierre] not justice 
but policy." There was calculation as well as ven- 
geance, anger, and conviction in the Jacobin onslaught 
on the King. Unfortunate Louis XVI! He was the 
bone of contention between two raging parties at the 
very moment when his patience, his serenity, his 
simplicity in unexampled reverses (for Charles I was 
never treated with quite the same brutality) began to 
endear him to the hearts of, at least, the common 
people. They had never seen the King so close at 
hand. The sentries on duty at the Temple were 
chosen from the town militia — the Garde nationale — 
and constantly varied, lest familiarity favour a system 
of intrigues between the guards and the prisoners; 
in this way a considerable number of Parisians enjoyed 
their look at Louis. Michelet, that ardent apostle of 
the Revolution, tells us that his father was one of these 
sentries of the Temple, and that he came away much 
impressed by the artless good-nature and the in- 
genuity of Louis Seize. "The tyrant seems a simple, 
easy sort of fellow!" the Republican guards would 
say, a little mystified, as they watched the stout, 
hearty King give his little boy a lesson in geography 
or play a game of piquet to amuse his wife. No bitter- 
ness, no rancour showed in his demeanour and if he 
had occasion to speak to his jailers, it would be to 
ask them news of their family or to express in his 
natural way some simple sentiment or homely axiom 
which made them feel akin. ... On the nth of 
December (1792), when the King's trial began, he was 
kept all day in court without food or drink; his huge 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 233 

Bourbon appetite, that nothing ever checked, tor- 
mented the poor prisoner ; and, as he drove homewards 
to his dungeon of the Temple, seeing one of his escort 
munch a chunk of bread, he asked the man for a bit 
of it. Chaumette (he was Syndic of Paris) broke off 
a piece, of which Louis eagerly devoured the crust, 
and then held the crumb in his hand, not knowing 
what to do with it; Chaumette took it from him and 
threw it out of the window. The King looked sur- 
prised. "My grandmother [said Chaumette] used to 
say : Never throw away a crumb of bread; you couldn't 
make it grow!" 

"Monsieur Chaumette [said the King], your grand- 
mother was a woman of great sense. Bread is the 
gift of God." 

And in this homely fashion the royal captive, already 
practically condemned to death, chatted with his 
Republican jailer on his way to his prison. ... A 
number of little traits of this sort became diffused 
among the people, and one may say that never since 
his youth had the ^^bon Roi'^ been so popular as on the 
very eve of his execution. 

There was no time to lose. The Jacobins hurried 
on the fatal hour and overbore the passionate oppo- 
sition of the Girondins. Robespierre was evidently 
anxious. He rejected the idea of an appeal to the 
people: "For are not the virtuous always a minority?" 
Saint- Just went further still: "An appeal to the people 
[said he] might well be a revival of the monarchy." 
That which they had to do, they would do quickly. 

On the 2 1st of January, 1793, Paris was declared in 
a state of siege. A great green close carriage, accom- 
panied by a strong escort, led Louis XVI to the Place 
Louis XV — the present Place de la Concorde. There 



234 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

stood the scaffold. The King mounted the steps, and 
then rushed forwards, meaning to address the people. 
The officer in command of the troops ordered the 
drums to beat. "The King then turned to us [wrote 
the executioner, Samson, who has left his recollections 
of this great event] and said: 'Gentlemen, I am inno- 
cent of that of which I am accused. May my blood 
cement the happiness of Frenchmen! " And he com- 
posed himself to death. I do not know if the Abbe 
Edgeworth really said then the fine phrase with which 
he is credited: ^^ Enfant de Saint-Louis, montez au del," 
but it is certain that, in that last scene, the King, 
who had so constantly wished to prove himself a child 
of Henri Quatre, showed himself really and truly a 
son of St. Louis. 

The death of the King rang the knell of the Gironde. 
The Girondins soon will be sent in droves to the scaffold ; 
will be hunted from their hiding-places in the woods 
with bloodhounds, like runaway slaves; will know 
every form of misery and humiliation. The Royalist 
risings in the South and West will only add an excuse 
to the Reign of Terror. The triumph of the Jacobins 
appears complete. As a firm lover of France, I cannot 
bring myself to write the innumerable lists of their 
victims. "Liberty," said Madame Roland, "what 
crimes are committed in thy name!" Yet by their 
system of tyranny and sacrifice, by the way they 
centralized the energies of France, by their extermina- 
tion of all possible resistance, and by the very terror 
they inspired, the Jacobins attained that which they 
attempted, which was to secure the future of their 
country; they left her great, really "one and in- 
divisible," defended by fourteen armies comprising 
twelve hundred thousand men . 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 235 

While they mobilized men and money in defence 
of the country, in the teeth of all Europe against 
them — with the Prussians in the Vosges; the Span- 
iards threatening Bayonne; the Prince of Coburg in 
front of Maubeuge; forty-five thousand Austrians 
and Italians in the Alps; fifty thousand Spaniards in 
the Pyrenees; more than a hundred thousand Austrians, 
Imperials, and English in Belgium and the lower 
Rhine; thirty- three thousand Austrians between the 
Meuse and the Moselle; a hundred and twelve thou- 
sand Germans on the Upper Rhine: with all these 
enemies and a federal insurrection in the South and 
West, these indomitable Terrorists still found time and 
liberty of mind to invent a new form of social order, 
which (when at last the triumph of the Republic 
should ensure eternal universal peace) might, they 
thought, confer on mankind the gifts of unity, frater- 
nity, and happiness. This new organization was, in 
fact, their "Kultur." 

Robespierre was their thinker, but their prophet 
was Saint- Just, a young man of four-and-twenty (in 
I793)> whose energy, passion, and genius — perhaps 
also his personal beauty and dark, solemn dignity — 
had brought him already to the very summit of affairs : 
the Committee of PubHc Safety. Nothing seemed 
simpler to Saint- Just than, by a sequence of decrees 
expressed with tragic eloquence and enforced by ter- 
ror, to change the very spirit of a nation, the character 
of a race, the tendency of an age. Saint- Just, with his 
fixed, sombre gaze under his narrow forehead, saw, as 
he thought, in front of him, across a brief river of 
blood which he did not hesitate to ford, reach out, 
immense and splendid, the Golden Age, when no- 
body should be poor, when all men should live equal. 



236 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

There should be no more rich: "Opulence [said he] is 
infamy." 

"Let every citizen possess his daily bread, a roof 
over his head, a clean and comely wife, healthy, 
robust children; let him live in self-respecting in- 
dependence." 

"An organized democracy must furnish every 
citizen with that which he principally needs : work for 
the able, instruction for the child, assistance for the 
old and the infirm. 

"Between private persons the difference in the 
scale of living should be trifling: a slight degree should 
separate the maximum and the minimum; much the 
same standard of comfort in every house : that of a 
well-to-do farmer or prosperous artisan. 

''The children of all citizens between the ages of 
five and twelve shall be educated in common at the 
expense of the Republic." 

"No Frenchman [said Robespierre] should possess, 
in unearned increment, more than three thousand 
francs [£i2o] a year." 

"There must be neither rich nor poor." 

"We intend [said Marat] that every man who owns 
less than a hundred thousand francs [£4000] shall be 
on our side and feel that his interest lies in maintain- 
ing the Republic. If the rich will not share and share 
alike in the benefits of the Revolution, they are not of 
our family. We confiscated the estates of the emigres 
because they would not share with us the perils of the 
Revolution." 

"Egoism is the mortal sin and private property is 
its aliment." 

These last words, which are Saint-Just's, sum up 
the doctrine of the great Committee. 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 237 

But these opinions could not please those wealthy 
cities of the South — those opulent and cultivated 
bourgeois who, barely four years before, had thrown 
themselves into the Revolution in order to secure a 
wider, an unlimited field for their own development 
and their personal ambition. Thousands of bourgeois 
of Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyons (six thousand inhabit- 
ants were sacrificed at Lyons) were beheaded, drowned 
in the Rhine, or shot, in order to expiate the crime of 
rebellion against the dogmatism of Robespierre and 
the communism of Saint- Just. The Republic, in its 
narrow, fiery limits, could not include both Jacobins 
and Girondins: one or the other must perish. They 
were incompatible. 

It was a death-struggle between the Commune and 
the Convention — the centripetal and the centrifugal 
forces — and the issue appeared uncertain when the 
treason of Dumouriez, who commanded the French 
armies on the Belgian frontier, gave a fatal blow to 
the prestige of the Girondins. It was almost a slur 
on their honour, for Dumouriez, on his last, his recent, 
visit to Paris had been the constant guest and con- 
federate of the Girondins. Who was to take his place ? 
La Fayette, who commanded the armies of the centre, 
on learning the execution of the King, had shaken the 
dust of his country from his feet and was just setting 
forth for America (seeking, like Alceste, 

un endroit ^carte 
Oil d'etre homme d'honneur on ait la liberte), 

when on the very frontier he had been seized by the 
enemy and was now a military prisoner at Olmutz. 
Custine (another aristocrat) who had been sent to the 



238 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

North, had been beaten by the Prussians, recalled, 
beheaded (for such was the Jacobin way with a general 
not victorious) ''pour encourager les autres." De- 
cidedly the Girondins had no luck at all with their 
generals, whose incapacity or treason compromised 
the existence of France. The situation was terrible. 
The English were in Toulon; the army on the Rhine 
was retreating before the victors of Mayence; the 
Dutch and the English were masters of Valenciennes; 
the army of the North was at the mercy of the Austrians. 
Lyons was in open revolt; La Vende was at war with 
the Republic; two-thirds of the departments were 
threatening insurrection. Meanwhile, in the capital 
(for Celts will be Celts) the question was less "To be 
or not to be?" than "Which will carry the day, the 
Commune of Paris or the provincial Deputies?" 

The Jacobins at least took the situation seriously. 
On learning the danger of France, they decreed a levy 
of three hundred thousand men, a measure which was 
carried out in the provinces in the midst of pro- 
test, agitation — sometimes insurrection and sometimes 
civil war; for, in that age of professional armies, the 
obligation of military service appeared the most mur- 
derous form of tyranny. When the farmers of the 
South and the West saw their lads driven from the 
land in order to fight for a Government who had 
cut off the head of the King, exiled the clergy, and 
who now, worse luck! threatened their own deputies 
■ — the members of their choice — they put their heads 
together and cogitated: "Well! Since fight they 
must, our sons shall fight for us!" and they joined the 
men of Lyons, the Cevennes La Vendee. Normandy 
too, displayed disquieting symptoms. 

And in Paris the Jacobins inaugurated a Revolu- 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 239 

tionary Tribunal which was to take a short way with 
traitors. As Robespierre explained: "The Tribunal 
will judge only one form of offence: High Treason; 
for which there is only one punishment, Death. 
It is therefore useless that time should be wasted in 
long deliberations." The Jacobins, the Commune, 
and the Mountain voted an enforced loan to be 
levied on the rich, repayable three years after the 
conclusion of peace. All these measures: requisition 
of men and money. Revolutionary Tribunal, even the 
Committee of Public Safety, were abominable in the 
eyes of the Gironde, who declared that France was about 
to witness "a worse tyranny than that of Venice." 
The Girondin members appealed to the provinces. 
They felt themselves in imminent danger, and with them 
the laws and liberties of France. And Marat, the 
soul of the Commune — Marat, a lunatic crank inflamed 
with fever and political passion (or, if you like it, as 
the Jacobins put it, ''Marat, ce pMlosophe forme par 
la meditation et le malheur") — Marat declared, with his 
great, blazing sunken eyes glowering at the Girondins : 
"We must cut off a hundred thousand heads in order 
to save four-and-twenty millions of men." 

The Girondins had appealed to the departments. 
Against them Robespierre, that apostle of Unity, 
pronounced the word that was to ruin them without 
reprieve: Federalism. . . . Robespierre did not thun- 
der like Danton, or scream like Marat. But his clear, 
shrill voice enunciated calmly syllables that the ears 
of his listeners retained for ever. And it must be 
owned that, in this as in other things, Robespierre 
had a strange prevision of the future; as a thinker 
at least, as a seer, he made few mistakes. On the 
eve of the nineteenth century that was to fight such 



240 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

glorious fights for the unity of North America, the 
Unity of Italy, the Unity of Germany, the Unity of 
the Slavs, Robespierre saw, sixty years before the rest 
of us, the superannuated futility of the Girondins' 
federal ideal. He foresaw that, as he foresaw our 
terrible modem conception of the art and state of 
war. And he was equally ready to die for his dream 
or to drown in blood those that opposed it. 

No wonder the Girondins felt their blood run cold 
— or rather felt it run hotter than blood should run 
— for they were men of the fiery South. And the 
fieriest of them all, unhappily, was President of the 
Convention. He was, again unfortunately (since 
Aquitaine mixes a sober dose of reason in its heady 
wine), no lawyer from Bordeaux, like most of the 
Girondins, but a clever declamatory perfumer from 
Grasse, in Provence. On the 27th of May (1793) this 
man, Isnard, as President of the Convention, was 
required to receive a deputation from the Commune. 
And, at the sight of his enemy, his eloquence stole 
away his wits, and he declared: 

"Listen while I tell you! If ever, in an odious 
desecration, Paris should lay hands on the Deputies 
of the Nation, I declare to you, in the name of France, 
Paris shall disappear from the face of the earth, and 
men shall seek in vain on which bank of the Seine 
Paris once used to exist." 

Robespierre and Marat had now their excuse. It 
was sacrilege in the eyes of the Commune to speak 
ill of Paris, "the Capital of Liberty." Henceforth 
Isnard and all his comrades were hostages for the 
provinces. Robespierre washed his hands of them 
and their fate, saying, in his plaintive way, at the 
Society of Jacobins: "It is not for me to say how 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 241 

the people are to save the RepubHc. What is one 
man? It is not for me to indicate the necessary 
measures. I am ill. I am consumed by a slow fever, 
and especially by the fever of patriotism. I have 
said my say." The leader, with a sigh, sank into 
his seat. And the people of Paris, feeling the reins 
loose on their neck, rose in an obedient riot, invaded 
the Convention, armed with pikes and rifles, and, 
affirming their right to insurrection in their capacity 
of a Sovereign People, demanded the proscription of 
two-and-twenty deputies. It is not easy to say why 
they fixed on this particular figure. There were in 
the Assembly a great many more than two-and- 
twenty Girondins: M. Auland estimates their number 
at one hundred and sixty -five. But those twenty-two 
were a sort of General Staff. And besides, in one of 
those baseless libels disseminated by the party news- 
papers which were at the origin of most of the excesses 
of Paris, had it not been written that the Gironde had 
supplied Dumouriez with a list of two-and-twenty 
Jacobins whose heads were to fall the day when his 
armies should conquer the capital? 

The two-and-twenty escaped with their lives, ban- 
ished from the Convention, banishqd from the capital. 
Some of them proceeded to Rouen. It was a favourite 
idea of theirs, as it had been of the Kings, that the 
National Assembly of Deputies ought not to be exposed 
to the fret and fever of an excitable metropolis. The 
monarchy had governed from the stately quiet of 
Versailles. The Americans were even then founding a 
Parliamentary city (named after General Washington) 
in the very centre of their States. And the Girondins 
had thought of Bourges, because it is situated in the 
centre of France. But the evident sympathies of the 
16 



242 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

Normans for their cause had drawn them to Rouen, 
where they held a sort of informal congress to expound 
their views. And there they moved the patriotism 
and the passion of a young girl of noble instincts to 
such a fervour of pity and indignation that, keeping 
her own counsel, she left the city, and took the coach 
for Paris. . . . She was the great-granddaughter of 
Pierre Corneille, the tragic poet; a tragic solution 
came naturally to the mind of Charlotte Corday 
d'Armont. . , . We all know how she bought a 
knife under the arcades of the Palais Royal, how 
she called at Marat's house, forced her way into his 
presence, and stabbed him in his bath. That was 
on the 13th of July; four days later she paid her debt 
under the sliding axe of the guillotine, happy, because 
she thought that she had rid her country of a tyrant. 
Alas ! she had only sent her friends, the Girondins, to 
the scaffold. 

The murder of Marat had maddened Paris, for 
Marat was the idol of the people. "Cceur de Jesus! 
Cceur de Marat!'' prayed the Jacobins, and his bust 
was set on many a patriotic altar. We see the saints 
we adore through a magic prism which makes them 
resemble an image in our heart. It is difficult for us 
to comprehend the cultus of Paris for this pretentious 
and bloodthirsty lunatic; but to the men of the Ter- 
ror Marat appeared all pity, all power, all certitude of 
salvation; and in their ignorance they took the hare- 
brained doctor for a man of science: ''Marat, ce philo- 
sophe forme par la meditation et le malheur.'" 

The murder of a god exacts a bloody sacrifice. The 
Girondin deputies were tracked like wild beasts, im- 
prisoned, beheaded. On the 3rd of October twelve 
of them were guillotined in Paris. At the other end 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 243 

of France, in their own Bordeaux, another half-dozen 
were guillotined. Some tried to escape; the corpse 
of Petion was found in the fields half eaten by the 
dogs. Condorcet committed suicide. Almost all the 
personages mentioned in this narrative will come to 
the same violent end: the Queen, beheaded on the 
15th of October; Madame Elisabeth a few months 
later; Chaumette, the Syndic-Procureur of Paris, after 
his royal prisoner; Barnave, regretting only (as he 
wrote to one of his sisters) the pleasures of friendship 
"et la culture de V esprit, dont r habitude a souvent rempli 
mes journees d'une maniere delicieuse'' ; and later (as 
the tragic whirligig went round, bringing new men 
up, sending others down)Danton, the giant of the Rev- 
olution sacrificed by Robespierre; then Robespierre 
himself; Saint- Just. . . . 

Two thousand five hundred persons were executed 
in Paris during the Terror, five thousand drowned 
in the Loire at Nantes; at Lyons the "suspects" were 
shot down in troops. 

"A sad fatality [said Camille Desmoulins, one 
December evening at the Society of Jacobins] — an 
unhappy fatality wills that, out of sixty persons who 
witnessed my marriage contract, only two remain: 
Robespierre and Danton; all the rest are guillotined 
or have emigrated." Imprudent Camille! Such re- 
flections are not esteemed ' ' civic. ' ' Thy gifted feather- 
head will soon fall in the basket — soon to be joined 
by Robespierre's and Danton's. 

When, in its first glow of dawn, the Republic had 
gladdened the world, its prophets had considered their 
new government in the light of a religion: the Re- 
public was the successor of superannuated Christian- 



244 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

ity. The years should no longer- be counted from the 
birth of Jesus Christ, but from the proclamation of 
the Republic; in the new year there were twelve 
months with, in each, three weeks, or decades, of ten 
days, with a sort of leap-year surplus for Republican 
festivals. The year began, with the era, on the 22nd 
of September, 1 792 (the day of the autiunnal equinox) , 
and the months ran in their courses: Vendemiaire, 
the vintage month; Brumaire, the month of mists; 
Frimaire, of freezing; Nivose, the snow month; Plu- 
viose, the time of rains; Ventose, the windy season; 
Germinal, when plants begin to germinate; Floreal, 
the month of flowers; Prairial, the time of hay-fields; 
Messidor, the harvest-moon; Thermidor, the hot 
season; Fructidor, the season of fruits. 

Of all these lovely names, only two are still frequent 
on our lips. We still speak of Thermidor and of Bru- 
maire, because of the great political events with which 
they are associated. 

A nation cannot lose, by Act of Parliament, the 
mental habit of many centuries. In France, in any 
difficulty, Frenchmen naturally ttuned towards the 
King. In 1793, when all Europe fell on France, 
while in her own boundaries there raged a war of se- 
cession, even the Republicans looked instinctively for 
some strong man — some Anax andron — to appear 
and deliver. The Girondins had called Marat before 
the bar of his peers because he had cried that France 
needed a chief, "a military Tribune." In August, 
1793, in the Society of Jacobins, another orator arose 
and announced the advent of a Messiah, '7e grand 
homme qui doit parattre, qui sauvera son pays et donnera 
la paix en assurant le bonheur du monde.'' At that mo- 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 245 

ment, sick of anarchy, the eyes of France turned to- 
wards Robespierre; that spick-and-span, elegant, slim, 
and gentle figure appeared, no less than the wild, filthy, 
raving Marat, the expected Angel of Deliverance: so 
deep was the need of a saviour. But Robespierre was 
incapable of impulse or daring. In opposition to most 
historians, I believe that Robespierre was perfectly sin- 
cere and perfectly well-intentioned ; but, rapt in his vision 
and his system, his imagination lacked the human touch 
that made a Danton, for instance, passionately aware of 
the horror of his crimes. Robespierre saw the world as a 
tissue of numbers, and maxims, and systems ; of all the 
blood he shed, no warm drop splashed up in his eyes 
or stained his heart. . . . Was this unpleasant opera- 
tion necessary for the infinite advantage of Humanity ? 
He thought it was, and esteemed himself an apostle 
and a benefactor. While Danton, disgusted with his 
own bloodguiltiness, exclaimed: "J'aime mieux etre 
guillotine que guillotineur !'' Robespierre, gazing into 
the future, smiled ecstatically, and murmured : "Encore 
quelques serpents d ecraser!" 

Those last serpents crushed, he felt the Millennium 
at hand. 

The odd thing is that Robespierre should have been 
popular, as he certainly was. More than once be- 
tween the summer of '93 and the summer of '94, Paris 
threw herself at his feet and would fain have thrown 
herself into his arms. 

Robespierre was apparently shocked; he considered 
these advances as an improper proposal. The only 
use he made of his power was to exterminate heresy, 
and that with such ruthless vigour that at last the 
very city that had adored him felt her gorge rise at 
the sight of those clear green eyes, at the sound of 



246 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

that clear keen voice, always demanding blood, more 
blood — turned from him with loathing and sent him 
to join the thousands he had slaughtered. 

On the 9th of Thermidor in the year Two — on the 
27th of July, 1794 — the Reign of Terror came to a 
sudden end. Robespierre, Saint- Just, and their com- 
panions were sent to the giiillotine by an unexpected 
revolt and coup d'etat of their confederates. 

And on the morrow — on the morning of the loth of 
Thermidor — when the Deputies of the Convention 
left the Tuileries they were hailed with the shouts of 
a crowd delirious with joy. Women threw roses at 
them as they passed; young men seized the skirts 
of their coats and lifted them to their impassioned 
lips. The men of the moment (new names: Tallien, 
Freron, Barras) looked at each other in surprise. 
They had guillotined their old accomplice, Robes- 
pierre, as a matter of political necessity, and doubtless 
had intended to continue an excellent method for 
securing a majority. But, being neither men of genius 
like Danton, men of character like Saint- Just, nor 
men of absolute and reasoned conviction like Robes- 
pierre, but just opportunists and men of politics, 
they grasped the situation in a twinkling. So mercy 
was to be the order of the day? They welcomed an 
idea which decided that Robespierre's avengers could 
not anew pretend to place and power. Henceforth 
the Jacobins were fallen from grace. . . . 

And a certain Thibaudeau writes in his Memoirs: 

''On semblait sortir du tombeau et renattre d la vie." 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Same as preceding chapter, especially Aulard, Jacobins; Madelin, 
Revolution; Taine, Revolution, t. iii.; Michelet, Revolution, 
t. V. et vL 



THE REIGN OF TERROR 247 

Lamartine: Histoire des Girondins. 

Emile Dard : Le General Choderlos de Laclos. 

Albert Mathiez: "La Mobilisation en I'an II" {Rm)ue de I>aris, 

I avril, 1917). 
Anatole France: Les Dieux ont soif. 



CHAPTER II 

THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 

A YEAR after the reaction of Thermidor, the Republic 
was again on the eve of civil war. The fall of Robes- 
pierre had removed that soul of tense Republican 
energy which had created armies, organized victory, 
and governed a country in circumstances of unparal- 
leled distress; and now, in a relaxing of every fibre, 
a general indifference, an indolence, a longing for 
pleasure and luxury and wealth, seemed suddenly to 
invade the strenuous nation, to set it smiling and 
trifling and dreaming, with its enemy still in the gate. 
A new class had arisen — speculators and stockjobbers, 
estate-agents, contractors, especially army contractors 
— enriched with the spoils of the Revolution and much 
inclined to think, after the manner of a certain Pope, 
that, since God had seen fit to give them the Republic, 
they would enjoy it. 

France had disarmed three of her foes and had 
enlarged her borders. In 1795 the Peace of Bale 
made Spain her ally, while Prussia yielded her the 
left bank of the Rhine. Peace with Holland followed. 
In three years France had added to her territory nine 
new departments, had gained the Rhine and Belgiimi, 
had filled out her natural limits. Those three years 
had done more than the three preceding centuries. 

248 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 249 

In blaming the crimes of the Convention, let us re- 
member its benefits: the Romans of old forgave 
much to the conqueror who enlarged the circuit of 
the city. The Republic had expanded the "pomoe- 
rium" of France. 

Within doors, too, the Convention had not been 
idle, had elaborated a scheme of popular education, 
had founded most of the great public colleges that 
exist to-day: Ecole Normale, Polytechnique, Saint- 
Cyr, Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. At once 
beneficent and criminal, the Convention had let no 
sacrifice and no scruple divert it from its task. But 
it had ruled with an absolute power, a rod of iron. . . . 
And tyranny, whether it be of a King or a Convention, 
soon exhausts the gratitude of those who benefit by 
its exactions. 

So now the heroic and terrible Convention, come to 
its natural term of three years, was expiring amid 
the impatience of a public eager to be rid of it, a pub- 
lic in love with mediocrity. But the Convention 
could not accept its end. Chiefly from love of power, 
but partly no doubt from patriotism, it clung to 
office. Remembering the disorganization which had 
followed its own election, when no single deputy had 
any experience of affairs, the Convention issued a 
decree : Two thirds of the members of the new Legis- 
lative Assembly were to be chosen from its body. 
The Royalists and Girondins greeted this audacious 
fiat with shouts of rage: "Down with the assassins! 
Death to the Commune! Down with the Terror!" 
while the democratic "Sections" of the city openly 
threatened a counter-revolution and spoke of the right 
of the Sovereign People to change the form of its Gov- 
ernment, at its own sweet will, as often as it pleased. 



250 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

The Convention, which had sent Louis XVI to 
the scaffold, which had beheaded Marie-Antoinette, 
which had exterminated the Girondins and sacrificed 
its own leaders, — Danton, Robespierre, Saint- Just, — 
was now in its turn menaced with the customary fate 
of tyrants. But the Terrorists of yesterday were 
men of resolution. They meant to die hard and fight 
in self-defence. Aware that Paris intended to attack 
them at their next meeting, the Convention prepared 
itself to stand a siege. Barras, one of the leaders, 
remembered a young, small, sombre Corsican officer 
who had brilliantly recovered Toulon from the English. 
He sent for this young General Buona-Parte (for thus 
they wrote his name), and so Napoleon enters our field 
of vision. 

He was twenty-six years of age, ignorant, original, 
full of projects and ideas — what the Germans call a 
world-mender, a Welt-Verbesserer. "Nothing ever as- 
tonished me so much as to see M. Bonaparte win 
battle after battle [said a French officer of the old 
school to Stendhal in Berlin]. He talked so much. 
I expected nothing from a man so full of interminable 
discussions; he wished to reform everything in the 
State." Except in military tactics, the practice of 
artillery, mathematics, Rousseau's theories and Plu- 
tarch's Lives, Napoleon, though a great reader, was 
no scholar; he had little Latin and less Greek; he was 
singularly ill instructed even in the recent discoveries 
of science. But he was a logical dreamer, and (as I 
have said more than once) that is the sort which does 
great things in France. 

He talked, when occasion occurred to expatiate on 
his special hobby, but he was capable of infinite silence 
and self-absorption. He talked, but he had no small 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 251 

talk. And even when eloquent he often looked silent, 
his gaze was so sombre and so fixed. This profound 
inward glance struck every observer who has left us 
his impression of the young Napoleon. But for its 
beauty he would have seemed but an ugly little man, so 
meagre, so painfully wasted, so sallow, wich a great shock 
of unkempt brown hair hanging in untidy "spaniel's 
ears" over his cheeks and down below his chin, "alto- 
gether too much hair [said a lady who liked him to 
Stendhal] for so much eyes." And yet, to an artist's 
thinking, those wasted, drawn features — those great 
grey eyes so deeply sunk under the frontal arch — 
held the promise of classic beauty, especially the chis- 
elled mouth. 

"There was little of the soldier about him [said 
Stendhal's informant], nothing military, martial, loud, 
or dashing. He looked desperately poor, but then 
he was paid in paper money! I think we might have 
read even then in the contour of his exquisite lips 
that he despised danger and that danger never made 
him lose his self-command." 

(This lady may have been Laure Permon, Duchesse 
d'Abrantes, the portrait is so like her description of 
the Napoleon she knew from his youth up; or was 
she Madame Victorine de Chastenay?) 

Her account corroborates Hyde de Neuville's, who, 
a few years later, noticed Bonaparte as a shabby, 
untidy little man, something like a clerk or an usher 
— ''petit, maigre, les cheveux colles sur les tempes, un 
air de negligence extreme,'' utterly insignificant until 
he transfixed you with that piercing, investigating, 
penetrating gaze no man ever forgot. 

A recent controversy (in The Times) has discussed 
the question of Napoleon's height. He seems to have 



252 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

been just over five feet six inches in stature — counting 
English inches: the old French ''pied'' and "pouce'' 
are not the same. Five foot six is not very small for 
a Southerner, and yet Napoleon is always spoken of 
as a little man. But he was ill-proportioned; the bust 
too long for his legs ; and even in youth he stooped and 
poked his head. He was then as much too spare as 
in later life he became too corpulent for his height. 
We remember how little Laure Permon, when first 
she saw him in uniform, laughed at his scraggy shanks 
emerging from the wide tops of his immense Hessians, 
and how her sister dubbed the young Lieutenant 
"Puss-in-Boots." 

"Dans sa jeunesse [she says elsewhere] Napoleon 
etait laid.'' His sallow skin, yellow, almost grey, and 
his drawn thin features made this ugliness. As he 
grew stouter and stronger the complexion warmed to 
a pleasant ivory, agreeable to the sight, although to 
a practised eye its utter colourlessness might have 
foretold that malady of the digestion which had killed 
his father, and which will leave our hero barely another 
five-and-twenty years into which to crowd his ample 
destiny. A nervous jerk of the right shoulder, fre- 
quent in moments of excitement or emotion, as well as 
something emaciated, fatal, avid, sombre, in the whole 
aspect of the man, made him seem marked out for a 
tragic, not for a glorious, destiny. His appearance fore- 
shadowed St. Helena — not the Empire. 

Such was the man whom B arras summoned to rescue 
the Deputies of France. At this period, young Bona- 
parte was still a Jacobin. The younger Robespierre 
had been his friend; he had admired Maximilien. 
It is probable that in his heart of hearts he sympathized 
with the "Sections" — a sort of Town Councils — of 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 253 

Paris rather than with these too prehensile Deputies. 
Still they represented authority. And they had sent 
for him: it was his chance, that Opportunity which a 
prompt genius seizes by the forelock. He considered 
a moment and said that he must have cannon: 
where was there a battery? 

There was one, he was told, just outside Paris, at 
the Park of Sablons, but it was thought that the 
local militia of the Sections was already in possession. 
"We must have it!" remarked our young man, mused 
a moment, and dispatched a friend of his in the cav- 
alry — a young daredevil called Murat — ^full speed to 
Sablons at the head of a company of Chasseurs. Murat 
routed the bourgeois of the Garde nationale, and brought 
forty cannon back to Paris, which Bonaparte installed 
all round the Tuileries. That expedition was to bring 
them each a crown. 

On the morrow, 13th Vendemiaire, in the year 
Three (5th of October, 1795), forty thousand Gardes 
nationaux attacked the Tuileries. In those days 
there was no rue de Rivoli; few streets and very nar- 
row led from the rue Saint-Honore to the palace and 
the gardens. In one of these narrow passages Bona- 
parte established a battery that swept the steps of 
Saint-Roch: the front of that church still shows the 
scars of the bullets that stopped the rush of the Sec- 
tions in that direction; another battery commanded 
the rue de RicheHeu; a third the bridge and the 
quays of the south bank. By nightfall the insurrection 
was suppressed. And a few days later the grateful 
Convention appointed the little Corsican to be Gen- 
eral-in-Chief commanding the Armies of the Interior — 
that is to say, all those not engaged in the invasion 
of Europe. "Such a position [says Napoleon in his 



254 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

Memoirs] is not suitable to a General of twenty-five." 
Before the ensuing spring was in full flower the Govern- 
ment granted the desire of his heart; in March, 1796, 
he was sent to command the armies in Italy. The 
bridegroom five days old of a beautiful woman whom 
he passionately adored, he left Paris, his eyes blind 
with tears, but his heart all on fire with the lust of 
conquest. 

Prussia and Holland had laid down their arms and 
had yielded their claims to the left bank of the Rhine. 
But Austria — the Empire (the ally of yesterday, and 
now the enemy of France) — ^was obstinate in main- 
taining her sovereignty. The struggle of France with 
Austria had filled the history of centuries. The 
alliance had been a trifle of less than forty years; 
it had never been popular; it had never seemed na- 
tural; and when the Gironde had declared war on 
Austria in 1792, the opening of hostilities had been 
greeted with national enthusiasm. Now after four 
years of battles, Austria (and England) still held out. 
The Republic sent one army to invade the Empire. 
Another, under Bonaparte, was dispatched across the 
Alps. England must wait her turn. 

It was classic to attack the Empire in Italy; over 
and over again we have seen the French armies take 
that road, invade Lombardy, but now the aim, at 
least, was different, more precise. 

The French Revolution was noiirished on Roman 
History. It was Danton who first — reviving that old 
dream of Richelieu's — had answered the invasion of 
France by a coalition of kings with the assertion of 
his country's right to her "natural frontiers," that is 
to say, the limits of Gaul: the sea, the ocean, the 
Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine. In 1792, the Execu- 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 255 

tive Council had assigned the Rhine as the boundary 
of the Republic. And now these "natural frontiers" 
were a word to conjure with; no Frenchman would 
have less. Belgium, Savoy, Alsace, were necessaries 
of life! And Bonaparte remembered Cisalpine Gaul: 
he would not only vanquish Austria, but create an 
allied Republic in Lombardy to protect Savoy. An- 
other in Holland would ensure the safety of Belgium. 
The great idea of Bonaparte (which he had received 
from the men of the Mountain) was to recover for the 
Republic "T heritage des Gaulois" — the full inheritance 
of Gaul. The wonderful thing is that he did it in a 
few weeks. 

Who can read without emotion the series of his bul- 
letins from Lombardy? 

The campaign in Italy began on the loth of April, 
1796. Napoleon proclaims from the summit of the 
Alps: 

"Soldiers! — 

"You are naked, half -starved. The Government 
owes you much and can give you nothing. Your pa- 
tience, your courage in the midst of these rocks 
are splendid, but will get you no glory. I will lead you 
into the most fertile plains in the world! Rich pro- 
vinces, great cities, shall fall into your hands. Soldiers 
of Italy, do you lack the courage or the constancy 
to conquer them? ..." 

Another bulletin is dated the 26th: 

"Soldiers, in fifteen days you have gained half a 
dozen victories! You have taken one-and-twenty 
flags, fifty-five cannon, and several fortresses. You 
have conquered the richest territory in Piedmont, 



256 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

made fifteen thousand prisoners; you have killed or 
wounded ten thousand of the enemy. . . . But, 
soldiers, you have done nothing, since you have still 
so much to do. As yet we possess neither Milan nor 
Turin! . . ." 

Three weeks later he writes to Camot: 

"The battle of Lodi gives Lombardy to the Repub- 
lic. You may consider me at Milan." 

One more move on his marvellous chessboard and 
there he was. The next dispatch is dated: "From 
our General Headquarters at Milan, 5 Prairial, an 4" 
(24th of May, 1796). 

In those incoherent reminiscences and notes which 
Stendhal chose to entitle the Life of Napoleon, we 
find a living picture of the French occupation of Milan. 
Youth, glory, hope, joy, enthusiasm, beauty, compose 
its colours. General Bonaparte was twenty-six, and 
"he was one of the oldest of us," says Stendhal. Never 
was an army so young or so gay, never was an army 
so ragged or so poor, so enchanted with a pair of new 
boots or a suit of clean linen, when the wealth of 
Lombardy began to roll into those empty pockets. 
The General had sent for his bride and his sisters, 
who reigned at Montebello and at the Palazzo Ser- 
belloni; but his young officers were dazzled by the 
high combs, the lace mantillas, the dark eyes, the 
mysterious, insinuating smile of the ladies of Lombardy, 
who, in hatred of the Austrians, received their invaders 
with open arms. Those were days of love and war. 
At the entry of the French into Milan, the whole 
populace shouted one immense "Evviva T'; all the 
lovely Lombard ladies were on their balconies, shower- 
ing roses and kisses. Beyond the Spanish ramparts 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 25^ 

of the city, the plain in its fresh green stretched out 
for leagues, so covered with trees it appeared a forest, 
and, in the distance, the chain of the Alps, glittering 
with snow, from Monte Viso to Monte Rosa, reared 
their sparkling summits in the hot, blue sky. Rising 
out of the gardens near at hand, the lacy whiteness 
of the cathedral's marble dome appeared a reflection 
of that Alpine splendour. 

That spring of 1 796 was the romance of the Revolu- 
tion. The Hour and the Man had met. Marat's 
"military tribune," the "grand homme'' whom the 
Jacobins had prophesied, whose advent should bring 
*7e bonheur au monde,'' had appeared on the scene. 
Bonaparte occupied the horizons of Europe. The Re- 
public of Lombardy soared into freedom and hap- 
piness without a struggle. Everywhere the Austrians 
were put to flight. The campaign of Rivoli lasted 
just folu" days. On the evening that followed the 
victory one of the French generals, faint with fatigue, 
came up to Bonaparte; Napoleon pointed to a great 
heap of Austrian flags which were being brought in 
from every quarter and flung down at his feet — 

"Make your bed there, Lasalle [he said], and rest. 
You have earned it." 

And the tired hero slept on his bed of trophies. 

But Bonaparte seemed never to rest from victory. 

Meanwhile, in France another new Constitution 
had changed in some respects the form of Government : 
there was a Chamber, called the Five Hundred; there 
was a Senate, the Conseil des Anciens; and a supreme 
board of Five Pentarchs united in a Directory. Such 
was the body of the last revolutionary Constitution; 
it had no soul. 

While the armies breathed youth, joy, and heroism, 
17 



258 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

the civil State seemed in a condition of collapse. 
General indifference attended its transactions. The 
taxes brought in nothing to the empty treasury. The 
assignats had reached their lowest depth. If we open 
some old account-book of the period the prices fill 
us with amazement: bread is sixty francs a pound; 
white beans, fourteen hundred francs the bushel — in 
paper money, of course; any other sort is scarce and 
most remunerative to its possessor: the louis d'or of 
four-and-twenty francs is worth twelve thousand 
francs in assignats ! Such was the condition of France 
after eight years of Revolution when Bonaparte began 
to send his millions of Italian gold to Paris: war in- 
demnities squeezed from Parma and Piacenza; Eng- 
lish booty snatched from the harbour of Leghorn; 
pictures and provinces wrung from the Pope. After 
Mantua he sent thirty millions (of francs) in gold to 
the Minister of Finance in Paris ''pour le soulagement 
du tresor public" enriched the museums of the capital 
with more than three hundred masterpieces "which 
it has taken thirty centuries to produce," flew the 
French colours on the borders of the Adriatic, estab- 
lished two Republics, filials of France, across the 
Alps, and brought into the French alliance Parma, 
Sardinia, Naples, and the Pope! The Treaty of 
Campo-Formio (1797) showed Austria vanquished, 
and flattered the passionate opposition of the French 
to the hated nation. For the France of the Revolu- 
tion (which in more things than one returned to the 
traditions of Louis XIV) believed that France could 
never be free while Austria was prosperous. 

At Campo-Formio, Austria, sorely against her will, 
accepted the new doctrine of the "natural frontiers" 
— the left bank of the Rhine and Belgium (which the 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 259 

victorious armies of the Republic held in their posses- 
sion) — and acknowledged the Republic of Lombardy. 
But Bonaparte had to grant the Emperor something 
in exchange: I think that which he sacrificed was 
his honour. He offered up unoffending Venice. He 
took what lay readiest to his hand without thought 
of right or wrong. Here we catch the first peep of 
the "Corsican ogre" familiar to our fathers; of that 
Napoleon who in 1799 will massacre twelve hundred 
Turkish prisoners at Jaffa, though they surrendered 
to his parole, because he has no means of feeding or 
guarding them; who, in 1804, will assassinate the Duke 
of Enghien; who during the terrible stampede of the 
retreat from Russia will abandon his wounded; the 
Napoleon who frankly owned one day to Josephine: 
^'Les his de morale et de convenance ne peuvent ttre 
fattes pour moV On this occasion he quietly wrote 
to the Directory: ''Venise patera le Rhin"; and all 
parties (except Venice) appeared satisfied with the 
transaction. 

Bonaparte reigned in Italy. When he returned to 
France, covered with laurels, followed by the train of 
his spoils and conquests, it was evident that the 
victorious General, although no member of the Gov- 
ernment, was the only popular potentate in France. 
The Directory, whose existence he had assured, whose 
means of livelihood he had suppHed, looked askance 
at this too brilliant benefactor. But Bonaparte did 
not yet wish to reign; the pear was not yet ripe. 
England had not made peace. 

Just as Napoleon had made war on Austria in Italy, 
he determined to engage England in Egypt, prior to 
invading India. It is true that Egypt at that date 
belonged, not to perfidious Albion but to Turkey, 



26o THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

with whom France was no longer at war; but that 
was a detail. If the campaign in Italy had been the 
romance of the Revolution, the invasion of Egypt 
was its mystery, its aureole, its great adventure. 
Bonaparte set out for Alexandria attended not only 
by a brilliant cohort of generals and 38,000 seasoned 
troops, but by the first mathematicians, geologists, 
chemists, and antiquaries of France; one of them, 
ChampoUion, discovered the key to the hieroglyphics 
of that elder world. "For the first time since the 
Roman Empire [writes Napoleon] a civilized nation, 
cultivating the arts and sciences, was about to visit, 
measure, and explore the superb ruins which, for cen- 
turies, have dazzled the curiosity of science." And 
he enumerates his aeronauts, his poets, his astronomers, 
and architects, "capables de creer les arts de la France 
au milieu des deserts de VArabie." But when the sol- 
diers of Bonaparte found themselves lost in those 
sterile wastes of sands, with unfriendly Arabs, "si 
laids, si feroces," and their women, ''plus sales en- 
core,'' for sole inhabitants, loud were their lamenta- 
tions for the lovely plains of Lombardy! The army 
was struck by a vague melancholy which nothing could 
overcome. Because, at every trace of antiquity, the 
battalions halted while the men of science measured, 
copied, dug, compared notes, the disgusted soldiers 
supposed that for this alone had they been called 
away from a fairer conquest, and in their chagrin 
they dubbed the asses of the transport "men of sci- 
ence." But the day came when, about five leagues 
from Cairo, they saw three vast rocks rise on the flat 
horizon of the desert and were told they had been 
raised by human hands. Though these were by far 
the most imposing monuments of the ancients that- 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 261 

the troops had yet encountered, the architects and 
statuaries kept in the rear and left the direction of 
affairs to the miHtary officers. The soldiers were told 
to prepare for battle. And their next move was the 
victory of the Pyramids. 

And now what wonderful names blaze like comets 
in the bulletins of Bonaparte: Alexandria, Jaffa, 
Nazareth! But while the soldiers on land went on 
from strength to strength, the English at Aboukir 
destroyed all the transport ships of the French, so 
that the victorious army was a prisoner in Egypt. 
The siege of Saint-Jean-d'Acre was long and terrible, 
but even this repulse could be disguised as a triumph. 
The difficxilties overcome, the dangers endured, the 
glory gathered, the rapidity of conquests which adorned 
the annals of France with the most splendid names 
of antiquity, all combined to increase the already daz- 
zling reputation of a General barely thirty. While 
in France, on all the frontiers, the Government blun- 
dered into ruin through defeat, the public said to its 
soul: "Patience. . . . When Bonaparte comes home." 

Sydney Smith, the English Admiral cruising off the 
coasts of Egypt, was a man endowed with the wisdom 
of the serpent. He arranged that a budget of news- 
papers, full of all the disasters and defeats of the 
Directory, should run the blockade and pass into the 
hands of General Bonaparte; in fact, with a perfidious 
courtesy, he gave them to a French officer come on 
board to parley concerning an exchange of prisoners. 
Bonaparte had been for three months deprived of 
news from home: when he saw the state of affairs in 
France, he determined to return at all risks. Rapidly 
and secretly he prepared his flight. A missive, deliv- 
ered only after his departure, entrusted the army to 



262 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

General Kleber. There were two Venetian frigates in 
the port of Alexandria; Bonaparte, with several of his 
generals and two of the inseparable mathematicians, 
went on board and, after an adventurous voyage 
of six weeks, escaped the enemy scouring the seas in 
quest of all French vessels, and landed off the coast of 
Provence, near Frejus, on the 17th Vendemiaire of the 
year Eight. Two days later the Directory at Paris re- 
ceived the news. It spread like wildfire. One name 
was on every lip: Bonaparte! Bonaparte! Bonaparte! 

Bonaparte had returned from Egypt to seize the 
reins of power. He meant to suppress the garrulous 
imbeciles of the Directory; but the country was 
still Republican; he could not declare himself King. 
He was too young to be a Director, had he aspired to 
a fraction of authority. And, in 1799, the form, the 
superstition, of a plurality of rulers appeared the 
very sign and symbol of a democratic government. 
Bonaparte did not profit immediately by the wild 
enthusiasm that greeted his return; he lay low; fre- 
quented the sessions of the Institute; affected the 
character of the archaeologist — the pensive and trav- 
elled antiquary. Meanwhile, he studied the public. 
The great majority of Frenchmen were weary of the 
Revolution's perpetual misrule,, and yet, as I have 
said, remained attached to its benefits. There was 
little desire for the King to come to his own again. 
The situation of the poor, especially in country places, 
was on the whole immensely unproved. We have it 
on the testimony of the Duke of Larochefoucauld- 
Liancourt (among others), a witness the more disin- 
terested that he was a man whom the Revolution had 
ruined; in his letters to his friend, Arthur Young, 
he notes the social changes brought about by the new 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 263 

state of things. Large estates have given place to 
very small ones, which yield at least one fourth more 
harvest and produce than the old. Agriculture is 
everywhere more intelligent. The homes of the 
peasants are improved, more spacious and cleaner. 
The labourers themselves are less ignorant than their 
fathers: ''Us sont plus gu'eux en Stat de reflechir, de 
combiner, un peu moins eloignes de toute innovation.'' 

The sale of the Church-lands and of the estates 
confiscated from the emigres had enriched a world of 
thrifty peasants who dreaded any change in the gov- 
ernment lest they should be ordered to disgorge. 
The love of property and not the love of liberty riveted 
them to the Revolution. It seems a paradox to say 
that the French are no great lovers of Liberty. But 
they are enthusiasts for Equality. Justice and not 
Freedom is really their national idol. The whole 
country would have risen in revolt rather than permit 
the re-estabHshment of the Three Orders and the 
privileges of the aristocracy. 

They were ready to obey a master, should he be 
just, should he maintain equality among his subor- 
dinates, and confirm their possession of the fields and 
farms they had bought so cheap with their assignats. 
Bonaparte saw his way clear. The most absolute of 
mortals prepared to consolidate a great democracy. 

He knew that he had a party in the State: the 
army, at least the younger generals, the Senate, all 
that stood for authority and discipline ; all that dreaded 
a threatening revival of the Reign of Terror. And, 
in fact, only the Terror or a Caesar could have saved 
France at that juncture. But the Chamber — the 
Cinq-cents — was against a Dictator, was, for the 
greater part, violently Jacobin. Appearances must 



264 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

be preserved. It was not as yet a question of mount- 
ing a horse, heading a charge, and issuing a pronun- 
ciamiento. At last the plan was evolved: the Senate 
suddenly informed the nation of a vast conspiracy 
against the Republic; the two Chambers were trans- 
ferred to Saint-Cloud, a few miles outside Paris, to 
deliberate in peaceful seclusion; and Bonaparte was 
named General-in-Chief, protecting the menaced 
legislators in the suburbs with a girdle of regiments 
and cannon. Three of the five Directors resigned — 
more or less spontaneously. The Cinq-cents and the 
Ancients were requested to decide on a reform of the 
government. The day was fixed: the 9th of Novem- 
ber, 1799; but History knows the date as the Dix-huit 
Brumaire. 

It was fine. All Paris — at least, all political Paris 
— set out for Saint-Cloud. One might have supposed 
that, in the course of the last ten years, the Parisians 
had been surfeited with changes in the Constitution, 
but, in that case too, it seems that appetite grows by 
what it feeds on. The palace and the gardens were 
crammed. On the first floor the Senate was assembled; 
on a raised ground-floor, in the Orangery, the Five 
Hundred held council, draped in their red robes of 
office. Everyone guessed that something momentous 
was about to happen; no one, not even Bonaparte, 
knew exactly what was in the air. 

The General's brother, Lucien Bonaparte, was 
President of the Cinq-cents. But, as time dragged on 
and nothing happened. Napoleon, always of a nerv- 
ous temperament, chafed at the suspense and felt he 
must act himself. Suddenly he entered the Orangery. 
He was greeted by a storm of abuse. Red sleeves 
flapped and struck him, half-stifled him, for he was 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 265 

small ; one giant of a deputy nearly knocked him down. 
And violent voices shrieked : ' ' Down with the Tyrant ! 
Down with the Dictator!" For one long moment he 
must have thought that all was lost. 

The grenadiers rushed in to save their General, and 
carried him off while, still in angry timiult, the Jaco- 
bins shouted: "Outlaw him! Outlaw him! Hors la 
loir' But the day was not yet done! "Soldiers, 
can I count on you?" cried Bonaparte. Despite 
their cries of affirmation, neither master nor men knew, 
at this juncture, what to do next. There was a long 
moment of hesitation. And then Lucien Bonaparte 
appeared. 

He was, as I have said, the President of the Five 
Hundred, and seemed to incarnate the Assembly. 
By this time General Bonaparte was on horseback; 
in a twinkling his brother was mounted and riding 
at his side: "Soldiers [said Lucien], the President of 
the Council of the Five Hundred assures you that the 
great majority of the Council is tyrannized and ter- 
rorized by a handful of dangerous assassins. . . . 
Will you deliver the representatives of France? . . . 
Those brigands in the Orangery are not the deputies 
of the nation, but the deputies of the dagger!" On 
this occasion it must be owned that the younger of 
the Corsican brothers was the more eloquent; he 
gave the army what it wanted: an excuse for its 
intervention. The drums beat; a column was formed 
in a tumult of cries. As if by magic, the daredevil 
Murat appeared and marched them up the shallow 
stairs leading to the Orangery. "Down with the 
Jacobins! Down with '93!" The spirit of Thermidor 
was in the air. 

In the Orangery the beat of the drums had struck 



266 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

a sudden terror. The door opened; Murat entered 
in a crowd of soldiers, with fixed bayonets. This 
apparition had a very different effect from that of 
the soHtary Bonaparte. In one instant the windows 
were open (they were but a few feet above the soft 
earth of the flower-beds underneath) and the red 
togas were lost to view in the gloom of a November 
twilight; tags and tatters of them were found on the 
morrow clinging to the thickets of the forest of Saint- 
Cloud, and even in the woods of Meudon. The people 
of Paris only laughed and said: "The Deputies have 
added another to the famous cascades of Saint-Cloud." 

And on the very morrow a new government was 
formed and the long reign of the Jacobins was brought 
to an end. There were no longer five Directors but 
three Consuls. The First Consul, during the ten 
years of his office, was to rule the State; he named the 
ministers, controlled the administration, and called 
the policy. And the First Consul, of course, was 
Bonaparte. His colleagues were neither rivals of 
his power nor critics of his policy; but they were very 
useful underlings, men of capacity and experience, 
well chosen (for he chose them himself) to support 
and enlighten a man of genius in a strange position; 
they were Napoleon's books of reference — ^indispensa- 
ble, humble auxiliaries. 

Bonaparte was now the master of France. Too 
proud to owe his elevation to a November night's 
dream, he determined to make broad the basis of his 
power: he referred his new Constitution to the nation. 
The people were asked to vote in approbation or re- 
pudiation of the new regime. Three millions answered : 
Yes! There were only fifteen hundred Nays. We 
hear of no revolt against the violent establishment 



THE COMING OF BONAPARTE 267 

of the new government. The RepubHc had entered 
into being with the thunderclap of a coup d'etat, and 
it was an axiom of the Revolution that only by such 
means could the State, in its distress, be saved. The 
right of insurrection, the direct appeal to popular 
force, was, in the eyes of Bonaparte's contemporaries, 
the supreme safeguard against tyranny, or misman- 
agement, or corruption. In such circumstances, the 
nation not only excused but required a coup d'etat 
— or, as they said, Sijournee, a day's work. And soon, 
in the opinion of the majority, Brumaire was classed as 
a good day's work. No one regretted the effete and 
miserable government of the Directory. The State 
now was in a firm hand. Napoleon begins to bud ia 
Bonaparte. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Taine: Le Regime Moderne: Napoleon. 

Kermoysan: Recueil de Le fires, Proclamations, Bulletins. 

E. Guillon: Napoleon Ecrivain. 

Frederic Masson: Napoleon et sa Famille. 

Albert Vandal: U Avenement de Bonaparte. 

Albert Sorel: Madame de Stael. 

VEurope et la Revolution, t. v. and vi. 
Herbert Fisher: Napoleon. 
Stendhal: La Vie de Napoleon. 
J. Bainville: Histoire de Deux Peuples. 
Louis Madelin: La Revolution. 
Chateaubriand: Memoires d'Outretombe. 
Madame de Remusat: Memoires. 
Madame d'Abrantes: Memoires. 
Balzac: Le Medecin de Campagne. 

Une Tenebreuse Affaire. 
Anatole France: Clio (La Muiron). 
Ferdinand Dreyfus: La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. 



CHAPTER III 

NAPOLEON 

Napoleon, First Consul, resembles the Emperor 
Napoleon only as the larva of some bright insect is 
like its future gorgeous self. The Consul was a man 
of peace. He was a great administrator; no man ever 
mastered so thoroughly the minutest machinery of 
government; he was Sully and Colbert and Necker 
in one. A great financier too; the ruined France of 
the Directory became prosperous under his manage- 
ment. And one of the legislators of all time. He 
considered the Code Napoleon his most enduring 
monument; and, indeed, the others have fallen like 
the flowers of the field. 

As head of the State, he was careful not to offend 
the democratic sentiment of the French. His first 
act is a plebiscite which grounds his government on 
the consent of the people. He is scrupulous not to 
overstep his privilege, and sometimes exasperates 
Cambaceres, the Second Consul (who remembers the 
speedier methods of the Convention), by the care with 
which he refers any administrative measure to the 
control of the Council. Never a ruler more circum- 
spect than he, more eager to profit by the experience 
of the great political bodies: the Senate, the Council 
of State. With them he undertakes the task of de- 

268 



NAPOLEON 269 

finitively reorganizing France, and elaborates a Con- 
stitution which in its essentials has resisted more than 
one change of dynasty, because it has the qualities 
chiefly necessary in national affairs : solidity, simplicity, 
economy, and order. 

The Revolution, in its various attempts at a Con- 
stitution, had organized the Communes, the cantons, 
the departments of France, but had not discovered 
the connecting link needed to attach the mechanism 
of provincial life to the vital centre, Paris. At one 
period, during the Reign of Terror, the ubiquitous 
Societes populaires — established in every town, almost 
in every village of the Republic — had served as an 
efficient if non-official means of communication with 
the Jacobin Government. But whether in town or 
country, the Jacobins now were in disgrace or non- 
existent. The local aristocracy had emigrated or 
perished on the scaffold. There was a gap between 
the Consuls and the Communes, a solution of con- 
tinuity, fatal to unity and order. Bonaparte revived 
the Intendants, with a difference — instituted, I mean 
to say, in each department a Prefect ; an agent charged 
with the supervision of all the affairs of a province: 
the collection and assessing of taxes, local expenditure, 
the administration of justice and police, the conduct 
of elections, the execution of the Government's decrees, 
etc. The Prefect is the vicar of the Central Power, 
the instrument of its will, and also the channel of its 
information. The First Consul corrected what might 
seem too rigid in his system by a complete absence of 
political colour in the men he chose to work it. He 
cast his net very wide; if a man were a good admin- 
istrator, he took him, were he Jacobin or Girondin, 
Feuillant or even aristocrat: a La Rochefoucauld 



270 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

was Prefect of Seine-et-Marne and the ex-Diike of 
Bethune-Charost one of the twelve Mayors of Paris. 
Here we touch the secret of the success of Napoleon's 
administration; he took account of realities, not of 
theories. Nothing could be more unlike the absolute, 
the ferocious idealism of a Robespierre or a Saint-Just, 
which invented a system, doubtless excellent in Cloud- 
Cuckoo-land, and then applied it, relentless, to an 
actual society which, wrapt in the fervour of their 
dream, they never seem to have envisaged. Napoleon, 
on the other hand, was nothing if not practical, and 
full of compromise. He took what he found ready to 
his hand, looked at it well, and turned it to the best 
advantage. And the result was something at once so 
supple and so strong — so exquisitely suited to its 
environment — that for fourscore years it served France 
with scarce a change, and even to-day supports solidly 
all of France's recent superstructures. 

Out of this new world of civil servants and State 
officials the First Consul created, by the choice of the 
functionaries he appointed, and by the consideration 
with which he surrounded them, a new aristocracy of 
his own making. The service of the State was a task 
so great that it conferred a sort of nobility on the man 
who performed it adequately. To be useful to one's 
country was the one thing needful! Napoleon placed 
so high the importance of the civil servant that, until 
1880 or thereabouts, the "fonctionnaires'' of France 
retained the first rank, at any rate in provincial society. 
Fifty years ago, and even thirty years ago, a Prefect 
was a very considerable personage. And even greater 
than he was M. le Premier President : the chief magis- 
trate of the local courts of justice. Below Prefect 
and President come a number of other officials — 



NAPOLEON 271 

collector of taxes, registrar, functionaries of the Post 
Office, the Rivers and Forests, the Roads and Bridges, 
the University, the Clergy; for Napoleon made his 
peace with the Church, and that was, perhaps, the 
master-stroke of his magic wand! By the Concordat, 
or convention, of 1801, it was agreed between the First 
Consul and the Pope that the civil power should name 
the Bishops and Archbishops, subject to the ordina- 
tion of the Pope, and that these, in their turn, should 
appoint the cures and vicars, subject to the ratifica- 
tion of the State; no claim on the forfeited Church- 
lands was to disturb in their rights of possession the 
holders of "biens nationaux." Thus peace was secured, 
and the peasants and the provincial bourgeoisie con- 
ciliated by the restoration of a beloved religion, which 
no longer threatened their tenure of its forfeited fields. 
Many an honest country lawyer, seated in his com- 
fortable confiscated priory, listened with tears in his 
eyes to the first peal of those church bells that, for the 
last ten years, had hung mute and useless in the belfry. 
This world of civil servants, magistrates, professors, 
priests, is all the more obedient to orders that it is 
constantly in movement. The turning wheel of For- 
tune and of State affairs leaves them no time to root 
and take on too many local interests. And from one 
end of France to the other they will find, whereso- 
ever they may be appointed, the same order, the same 
method, the same unity. There is of late in France 
a strong reaction against the centralization of Napo- 
leon's system; but we may suppose it suited the 
country, since it has lasted so long. The French like 
to depend on the central power for their administra- 
tion, and then to rail at that administration, which 
though evidently imperfect, is on the whole, I think, 



272 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

more efficient than that of any other country. The 
daily life of the nation still appears singularly well 
organized on Napoleon's bed-rock. 

Judge what it must have seemed, following on the 
confusion of the Directory! Not since the last years 
of Henri Quatre had France enjoyed a period of such 
promise and prosperity. During the four years in 
which Bonaparte worked with Portalis, Tronchet, 
Cambaceres, and the other Jurisconsults at the making 
of an unparalleled Civil Code, France was admirably 
governed, Vendee pacified, the Church conciliated, 
and everywhere Napoleon showed himself open to 
compromise, respectful of realities, willing to reckon 
with the force of a tradition. He knew how to make 
a sacrifice and accept a compensation, how to give 
and take; and out of shreds and patches he made an 
enduring fabric, as the Romans, with their slender 
bricks, built monuments that stand to-day. 

Meanwhile victory followed victory abroad. The 
mismanagement of the Directory had lost, or at least 
endangered, all Bonaparte's earlier conquests; but the 
First Consul soon redeemed their blunders. His 
initial dash was to secure that left bank of the Rhine 
which, to the sons of the Revolution, seemed the es- 
sential bulwark and natural frontier of France. Next 
he pounced on Milan, and, acclaimed in Lombardy 
by shouts of joy, he reasserted the power of France 
across the Alps by a splendid victory at Marengo. 
The next battle was at Hohenlinden. These are 
immortal names! For the second time the Holy 
Roman Empire was obliged to recognize and sanction 
the pretensions of France, and award her Alsace, 
Belgium, Savoy ; and also to admit the existence of her 
affiliated Republics in Lombardy, Switzerland, and 



NAPOLEON 273 

Holland. Austria made peace at Luneville in 1801, 
and England, in 1802, signed the Peace of Amiens. 
France had made short work of her enemies. 

Victory, peace, success, order, prosperity, bring a 
monarch many friends. But Napoleon had still irre- 
concilable foes. They were the same that Louis XVI 
had feared: the Jacobins, the emigres. Nothing 
could reconcile the first to the final loss of liberty; 
they had curbed their necks, for a moment, in war- 
time, to a yoke of their own choosing; they had, in 
Marat's phrase, "opposed the despotism of freedom 
to the despotism of Kings"; but that had been a 
matter of military necessity, a temporary derogation, 
an interlude : the Sovereign People had yielded none 
of its rights, which now were confiscated by one man, 
to all intents and purposes a monarch. Napoleon, 
in their sight, was as clearly an invading Brigand- 
chief as in the eyes of the stubbornest defenders of 
the Altar and the Throne. And the ultra-Royalists, 
although they had seen their friends and kinsfolk 
driven in herds to the place of butchery and slaughtered 
there like animals, loathed the Corsican usurper even 
worse than Robespierre. In their eyes Might, though 
never so seemly, could never stand for Right. Strange 
to think that these obscure Royalist conspirators, a 
hundred years ago, were fighting for the same prin- 
ciple — Right not Might — which the democracies of 
the world to-day defend in arms against the encroach- 
ments of the Central Empires ! 

Bonaparte felt the danger of their fervent fanaticism. 
All round him, his friends compared his rule to those 
last years of Henri IV which were the halcyon time 
of France; he could not but remember how the knife 
of Ravaillac had cut short that reign of prosperity. 

18 



274 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

And he, too, was in constant danger ; his own generals, 
jealous of his supremacy, conspired with his enemies 
in London. The West -country, only nominally paci- 
fied, was a hotbed of plots and murderous purposes. 
As for the Jacobins, their one religion was the State: 
in defence of their adored Republic the honestest of 
them would stick at nothing. On Christmas Eve, 
1800, an attempt was made to blow up Bonaparte 
by the explosion of an infernal machine as he drove 
to the Opera. There was an immense sensation in 
the theatre, women shedding tears, everyone cheering 
the First Consul; the windows of his wife's carriage 
were shattered; her daughter's neck was cut by the 
fragments of glass; nine persons were killed; twenty 
died of their injuries. Brave as he was. Napoleon 
was superstitious, and he was not an hereditary king, 
inured from his childhood to the risks of the "mStier 
de roi." This attempt made a deep impression on 
his sensibility. He thought it the work of fanatical 
Republicans, and transported a hundred and thirty 
Jacobins without a particle of evidence against them. 
Miserable man! He sent two of them to die on the 
island of Saint -Helena ! But Fouche, his Chief of 
Police, himself an ex- Jacobin, assured the First Consul 
that the real culprits were the emigres, who in foreign 
countries devised at their ease the plots they found 
means to execute in Paris. 

At the bare idea Napoleon lost his sang-froid : 
"Am I a dog [he would say] to be shot down in the 
street? And are my murderers a sort of sacred ani- 
mals?" This nervous rage must be his excuse — but 
no! there can be no excuse — for the assassination of 
the Duke of Enghien. 

It was in 1804 that a fresh conspiracy, vaster and 



NAPOLEON 275 

still more formidable, was framed among the enemies 
of Bonaparte. Two of his generals — Pichegru, the 
conqueror of Holland ; Moreau, who gained the victory 
at Hohenlinden — and a Breton yeoman, Georges 
Cadoudal, the very soul of the Royalist rising in the 
West, with three hundred Royalist gentlemen, were 
affiliated to the plot. Their scheme was to make a 
dash at Napoleon sword in hand, kidnap him one even- 
ing on the road to Malmaison — his country-house — 
or assail him in the midst of his Consular Guards 
during some ceremony on the Esplanade des Invalides. 
Revolt rather than murder was their object, and what 
they chiefly desired was to give the tyrant a taste of 
English hospitality (war had broken out afresh with 
England). Still, their swords were not for show, 
and they were prepared to kill him if he resisted. The 
police were informed in time: one of Georges Cadou- 
dal's friends sold him for a hundred thousand crowns. 
The Consul was all aflame with a passion of wrath and 
a feverish lust for revenge. It was rumoured that 
one of the younger Bourbon princes was as deep in 
the affair as Pichegru or Georges. The real culprit 
seems to have been the Duke of Berry, but Napoleon's 
suspicions fell on the Duke of Enghien, one of the 
youngest and most lovable of the Bourbons, at that 
time living in retirement in the duchy of Baden in 
the society of a woman with whom he was devotedly 
in love. Bonaparte had no more evidence of this 
young man's complicity than he had required four 
years before when he exiled the Jacobins: he acted on 
a Corsican impulse. Pichegru had been arrested in 
February, Georges on the 9th of March; on the 15th, 
the young Duke of Enghien was kidnapped in his own 
house, a few leagues on the further side the Rhine, 



276 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

was hurried in secrecy through France by the picket 
of dragoons who had carried him off, spirited to the 
Castle of Vincennes just outside Paris, tried there in 
the dead of night by a hastily summoned court-martial 
and shot in a fosse of the fortifications at two o'clock 
in the morning. This lawless, reckless crime, which 
violated the territory of a peaceful neighbour and 
outraged all the codes and conventions of international 
law, never ceased to haunt Napoleon, and more than 
any other action of his life discredited him in the 
eyes of Europe. He who loved order and discipline 
and regularity, he who had organized his country, he 
who loathed the misrule and anarchy of the Revolu- 
tion, had shown himself, in this mad vengeance, 
this unwarranted vendetta, as utterly estranged from 
the spirit of law as a Marat or a Danton. In later 
years I think he would have given several of his victo- 
ries to recall it. He mentions it in his Testament, 
not without remorse. He excuses himself by saying 
that the Count of Artois maintained sixty paid assas- 
sins at his orders in the French capital; in his latter 
days he laid the blame on Talleyrand and invoked 
the excuse of the tyrant who sacrificed Thomas a- 
Becket: "Why did my servant give me no chance 
of recalling the impulse of my wrath?" 

It was a last echo of Danton' s terrible policy: "faire 
peur aux Royalistes'' ; a warning that, in his dealings 
with them, the present master of France would exact 
an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth — and perhaps 
even an eye for a tooth ! But if in Europe the rumour 
of this brutal murder provoked a thrill of horror, in 
France it served his turn. To the mass of the French 
public, the innocent young duke, kidnapped from his 
German home, was as surely a conspirator and a 



NAPOLEON 211 

would-be assassin as Pichegru or Cadoudal: had he 
not paid the penalty of his crimes? His affair was, 
as the French say, chose jugee, and his memory a thing 
to abhor. The general adoration for Bonaparte was 
still increased by the danger from which he had so 
narrowly escaped, and the lesson to be drawn from 
the whole affair appeared the need of protecting him 
by every means. Now, the obvious way of defending 
a sovereign against assassination is to make his throne 
hereditary; there is far less inducement to remove 
a king who leaves an heir behind him. So, just a 
week after the shooting of the hapless Enghien, the 
Senate sent a solemn message to Bonaparte adjuring 
him to assume a hereditary crown — to take the style 
and title of Napoleon, Emperor. The country, con- 
sulted as before by a plebiscite, responded by a vote 
in which three million five hundred thousand Ayes 
took all the sting from a bare five thousand Noes. 
Meanwhile Cadoudal was executed, and Pichegru 
was found strangled in his prison. 

"The happiest moment of my life [the Emperor 
said one day in his exile] was perhaps after my victo- 
ries in Italy: what enthusiasm, what cries of 'Long 
live the Liberator of Italy!' — and all at twenty-five. 
From that time I saw what I might become. I al- 
ready saw the world beneath me as if I were being 
carried through the air." 

He must indeed have felt the world beneath him 
on that 1 8th of May, 1804, when he stood in Notre- 
Dame, crowned with laurel (as we see him in David's 
great picture), his generals all round him, a mass of 
gold and frothing feathers; his wife kneeling at his 
feet, her heavy jewelled train held by attendant prin- 
cesses; behind him, on the steps of the altar, the Pope 



278 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

of Rome, come so far to consecrate the Lord's Anointed. 
But, as Pope Pius lifted from the altar the very crown 
of Charlemagne, Napoleon suddenly reached out his 
arm, seized the symbol of sovereignty and, with his 
own hand unaided, settled it firmly on his brows. 

"I found the crown of France in the gutter [he said 
one day later]' and I picked it up on the point of my 
sword." 

The Emperor soon found himself at war with half 
the world. The Peace of Amiens had but lasted a 
twelvemonth, and Napoleon was again fighting Eng- 
land tooth and nail. By a characteristic act of his 
arbitrary authority, he detained as prisoners of war 
all the English travelling or residing in France at the 
moment when war was declared anew. His wrath 
against England flamed fierier than ever since his 
discovery of the Royalist plot, for, in his eyes, "per- 
fidious Albion" was not only a rival and enemy but 
the harbourer of all conspirators, the refuge of the 
Count of Artois, the chartered meeting-place of as- 
sassins. But he would soon reduce those proud 
islanders to nothingness! During the summer of 
1804 he concentrated his extraordinary intelligence 
on an "immense project": that of the utter destruc- 
tion of his enemy, and he spent five weeks on the 
north coast, in front of Dover. Why did he not 
succeed? Is there a Power that protects the brave 
against a tyrant? Napoleon seems to have forgotten 
nothing. His army was ready. His navy by a bril- 
liant series of feints was to decoy our ships to defend 
the coasts of Egypt and of India: "Give me three 
days undisturbed in the Dover Straits, and with God's 
help I'll make an end of England!" Those three 
days, happily, he was not to have. In vain he stands 



NAPOLEON 279 

on the shores of Boulogne mapping out his future 
conquests, and muttering to himself: "/e ferai une 
telle peur aux Anglais T' In vain his ships set out 
for the East in the most convincing order; no visible 
arm from Heaven intervened. Did a clerk in the 
French War Office, copying out the orders for the 
French fleet (he must have been a functionary of 
some rank), betray the Emperor's secret, as it has 
been supposed? John Bull remains unmoved, cruises 
calmly in the Channel, lets them dash unopposed 
towards Calcutta and Alexandria. After one bare 
week of emotion, London is cool as a cucumber. Ad- 
miral Comwallis continues to blockade the best French 
ships in Brest harbour (and there they remain "bottled 
up," as our modern phrase goes), while Nelson keeps 
an imperturbable eye on Toulon. In vain, swift as 
swallows, the French ships skimmed past the coasts 
of Ireland, to Egypt, to the West Indies. John Bull 
never turned a hair, smoked his pipe on his safe cliffs, 
and never thought of changing his plans. There 
were no Zeppelins in those days! And with the 
English boats in the Channel, no fear — despite the 
concentration of Frenchmen and fiat-bottomed boats 
on the sands across the ditch — no fear lest the fuming 
Emperor should slip across some dark night and 
invite himself to breakfast. It is true that one fine 
day the Corsican was to taste of EngHsh hospitality 
on an island — but not on ours! 

Napoleon in his best years was never obstinate. 
When he saw that one of his plans was doomed to 
failure, he immediately substituted another. As he 
himself explained to Las Cases in the Memorial, in 
his own remarkable words: 

**I was never bent on forcing circimistances to fit 



28o THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

in to my conceptions. As a rule, I let myself be led 
by the course of events. Who, beforehand, can say 
what unsuspected accident may change the shape of 
things? How often I have had to alter the very es- 
sence of a plan! Indeed, I nearly always acted on a 
general view of things rather than in accordance with 
a settled project." 

Therefore Napoleon abandoned the intended inva- 
sion of England (and, indeed, in after-days, was 
prone to say that he had never seriously meant it) 
and turned his mind to conquest of the Continental 
Powers. He had soon provoked Austrians, Russians, 
Prussians to a half unwilling quarrel. The two Em- 
perors (Austria, Russia) took the field. The latter, 
a young man, Alexander, believed in his innocence, 
that he could beat Napoleon. And his first experience 
was Austerlitz! The battle began on the anniversary 
of Bonaparte's coronation, the 2d of December, 1805, 
early in the morning. An hour after midday, Napo- 
leon was master of Europe. A few days later, the 
Austrian Francis II signed the Peace of Presburg. 
He renoimced the proud title of Emperor of Germany. 
There no longer existed a Holy Roman Empire. That 
age-long enemy of France simply disappeared. But 
Napoleon permitted his vanquished foe to adopt the 
humbler style of Emperor of Austria as he signed away 
Venice, Istria, Dalmatia, Tyrol, and many lands in 
Southern Germany. And, in place of the historic 
Empire — the natural enemy of France — Napoleon 
created a new league of the German States which he 
called the Confederation of the Rhine, no terrible foe, 
but, in Mr. Fisher's excellent phrase, "a mosaic of 
weak and warring Governments," for what Napoleon 
feared above all things was the unity of Germany. 



NAPOLEON 281 

Then the King of Prussia declared war on France; 
his two armies were annihilated in nine days as lena, 
as Auerstadt, followed Austerlitz. And Napoleon 
marched into Berlin. There he learns that the Rus- 
sians are coming to the aid of their allies, rushes 
towards them, beats them five times running on the 
banks of the Vistula, and hunts them into Poland. 
At Eylau they attempt to resist, but at Friedland 
the Russian General allows himself to be caught as 
in a trap. And the French victory was so complete 
that Alexander beHeved his defeat irretrievable and 
consented to the conqueror's terms of peace. At 
Tilsit, at the first contact with his enemy the enthu- 
siastic Alexander became his adoring friend. 

By this campaign Prussia was hopelessly mutilated, 
exhausted, and burdened with a French army of occu- 
pation; Russia had to recognize these changes and to 
accept a new kingdom of Westphalia, with Napoleon's 
brother Jer6me for its king. What is more, the Rus- 
sian Emperor had to consent to an alliance with the 
new Charlemagne. Napoleon was in the finest spirits. 
He liked the alliance; he liked the Tsar: "A very 
handsome, good young Emperor, with more mind 
than he is generally credited with"; he liked being 
able to patronize handsome Emperors, beautiful 
propitiatory Queens (like Louise of Prussia), and his 
old enemy, the ex-Emperor of Germany. He loved 
to dominate. And again he turned his thoughts to 
our unconquered island, more hated than ever now 
since, at Trafalgar, in 1805, Nelson had destroyed 
the French fleet. So, master of Europe in 1807, 
Napoleon parries the thrust by decreeing the Conti- 
nental Blockade — that is to say, all European ports 
were to be closed to English trade ; they should neither 



282 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

buy, nor sell, nor have any traffic with us. England 
was excommunicated! 

And then irrepressible Austria, always defeated, 
never irremediably vanquished — ^Austria, influenced 
by England, again declared war. Napoleon, who 
just then was occupied in Spain, in a blaze of anger 
rushed across the Pyrenees, darted his lightnings on 
Austria, conquered again at Wagram, and imposed 
peace at Vienna in 1809. 

Rivoli in 1796; Marengo in 1800; Austerlitz in 
1805; Wagram in 1809 — how many more crushing 
defeats would Austria require before Napoleon could 
be sure of her submission? Did some accident set 
him thinking of the old distich — how Austria made 
her way in the world not by fighting but by marrying : 
'^Tu, felix Austria, nuhe'^? Did the constant revolts 
of the untamed Empire make him devise a new manner 
of bond and curb? Did the difficulties of establish- 
ing a succession for the throne of France suggest the 
wisdom of an Imperial alliance? Josephine was six 
years older than her husband; she could no longer 
expect to give him an heir. He had loved her with 
an ardent, sensual, jealous passion — she was the only 
woman he had loved (so he averred on Saint-Helena) ; 
but it was clear she could not give a prince to 
the Empire. Reasons of State prevailed: like Titus, 
"dimisit invitus invitamy A divorce was pronounced 
between the French Emperor and his wife. In 18 10 
he married the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, 
Marie-Louise. In 181 1 a son was bom to them: 
the King of Rome. Napoleon had now entered the 
family of monarchs ; the little Corsican lieutenant had 
become the nephew by marriage of Marie- Antoinette, 

So lofty, so rapid an ascension may well disturb a 



NAPOLEON 283 

conqueror's moral balance. "If I had been placed 
so high," said the Russian Emperor, as he gazed on 
Napoleon's statue dominating the column of the Place 
Vendome — "if I had been placed so high, my head, 
too would have been dizzy." Lord Rosebery is right 
in supposing that supreme power destroyed the equi- 
librium of Napoleon's mind. After Wagram, after 
the Austrian alliance, it is easy to see now that the 
conqueror should have lain low, should have consoli- 
dated his magnificent position and not have sought 
to extend it. It was difficult for the society of sover- 
eigns to admit into their circle this victorious usurper 
who had humiliated them all. Yet if Bonaparte had 
shown himself the Bonaparte of 1799 — the scholarly, 
quiet, unassuming Bonaparte who had disarmed 
suspicion before displaying his full power — it is prob- 
able that Europe would have swallowed that difficult 
doctrine of the "Natural Limits," would have accorded 
France the left bank of the Rhine and the frontiers 
of the Empire of Gaul. . . . But, now that Napoleon 
thought himself sure of the non-opposition, and even 
of the support, of Austria, he became more than ever 
overweening and extravagant in his pretensions. 
The expansion of France threatened the breathing- 
space of Europe. Charlemagne of old had had one 
only brother with whom to divide the spoils of Empire. 
Napoleon had a whole ravenous family to find in 
thrones and crowns: France, Naples, Westphalia, 
Holland, did not exhaust his requirements; Lucien, 
Pauline, Caroline, Elisa, were still without a sceptre. 
"The Napoleon who declared that all the countries 
of Europe should keep their archives in Paris, that the 
French Empire should become the mother-country 
of all sovereignties, that all the kings of the earth 



284 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

should have palaces of residence in Paris and attend 
in state the coronations of the French Emperors . . . 
had obviously lost the balance of his reason. He had 
ceased to calculate coolly and to see any bounds — 
moral, physical, or international — to any freak of 
ambition which might occur to him."'' 

At this period of his career, did Napoleon lose his 
grasp of reality? Was he really mad? His ministers 
thought so; his wild dreams of universal conquest 
filled them with a mortal apprehension. The feel- 
ings of Talleyrand and Fouche may be likened to those 
of a traveller driven by a lunatic chauffeur along some 
mountain road that skirts a precipice. And not only 
themselves, but the future of France was imperilled. 
All the great functionaries who approached the Em- 
peror at that moment appear to have shared their 
dire misgiving. ' ' Voulez-vous que je vous dise la 
verite?" said Decres, the Minister of Marine, to Mar- 
shal Marmont, Duke of Ragusa, in 1810 — ''Voulez- 
vous que je vous dise la verite? UEmpereur est fou, 
tout-cL-Jait fou I II nous culbutera, tant que nous sommes. ' ' 

And Bernadotte, his old comrade-in-arms, just 
adopted by the King of Sweden for his heir, did not 
scruple to call his Emperor of yesterday ''un fou 
dangereux" — a dangerous lunatic. 

Narbonne, his general, his minister, the man whom 
Napoleon loved, exclaimed in 18 12: "Where is the 
keeper of this man of genius?" 

"He's a madman!" said Fouche — "Cest un insensS! 
Ilfaut enftnirl" 

Was he mad, or was he merely, as Talleyrand said, 
"uncivilized?" At any rate his vast dreams, his 
disregard of the possible, his violence, his impiilsive- 

' Lord Rosebery, Napoleon: the Last Phase. 



NAPOLEON 285 

ness, his egotism, fostered in those whom he offended 
a belief in the derangement of his mind. A Volney 
— whom he kicked in the stomach for saying that 
France wanted the Bourbons, and who was carried 
unconscious from his presence — or Berthier, whom he 
is said to have attacked with the tongs, or that chief 
justice whom he belaboured with his fists, may be 
excused for having their doubts as to his sanity. Too 
often his servants and his ministers pleaded lunacy 
in their sovereign to attenuate the vileness of their 
treacherous intrigues, yet in the treachery of a Fouche 
or a Talleyrand, love of country played its part. 
These ministers had undergone the strenuous training 
of the Jacobins; in all their avatars, whether Terror- 
ists, Republicans, pillars of the Empire or the Restora- 
tion, they were at heart the men of '93; they had 
one religion, their country, and one only virtue, patriot- 
ism. Despite their lack of honour, fidelity, morality, 
or truth, they had one ideal which constantly they 
served — the ultimate advantage of France. 

And it was not to the advantage of France, in their 
thinking, that Napoleon should whirl her without 
cease along the mad career of a second Attila. From 
the day when the Emperor began to cast his eyes with 
envy on Turkey and India a secret discord divided 
him from the heads of his administration, for Talley- 
rand and Fouche were disciples of Danton. They 
conceived France as a modern Gaul; so much, no 
more. Certainly not a universal Monarchia. "Le 
Khin, les Alpes, les Pyrenees [said Talleyrand], sont la 
conquete nationale. Le reste est la conquete de VEmpe- 
reur; la France n'y tient pas!'' 

And the ministers of a dangerous madman (as they 
thought) began to hold private confabulations with 



286 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

his enemies. In 1809 they did all they could to under- 
mine, by 'secret intrigue, the policy of their sover- 
eign — traitors to Napoleon, not to France. When, 
in 1808, Napoleon went to Erfurt to discuss with 
Alexander the proposed conquest of Constantinople, 
Talleyrand lay in wait for the Tsar and accosted 
him: 

"Sire, what are you doing here? Your part is to 
save Europe! And you can only save Europe by 
resisting Napoleon! The French nation is civiHzed; 
its sovereign is not civilized. The Emperor of Rus- 
sia is civilized; not so the Russian people. Let the 
Emperor of Russia be the ally of the people of France ! " 

The subtle, sentimental, vacillating Alexander was 
taken with this argument. Indeed, already the fasci- 
nating prestige of Napoleon, which had aroused his 
enthusiasm at Tilsit, was wearing thin. He per- 
ceived that the lion's ally must always accept the 
second place: Russia was sacrificed to the exigencies 
of the Continental Blockade. The trade of Russia 
demanded intercourse with England, which the French 
Emperor forbade. 

Talleyrand had time to indoctrinate an apt pupil 
before he met with a richly earned disgrace. In 1809 
Napoleon's mother, shrewd and suspicious as are the 
unlearned women of the South, surprised the secret 
intrigue of Talleyrand and Fouche — their carefully 
hidden colloquies in a friend's country-house at Su- 
resnes, and she herself heard Fouche say that phrase 
we have quoted : ''Cest un insense ! II faut en finir ! ' ' 
She warned her son. In six days Napoleon came 
posting back from Spain, dashed across France to 
Paris, sent Talleyrand to the rightabout, depriving 
him of his charge of Grand Chamberlain; he kept 



NAPOLEON 287 

Fouche, indispensable as head of the police, but he 
kept him under watch and ward. 

This was in 1810. The times were troubled. Napo- 
leon seemed possessed by a feverish, reckless desire 
to strain his fortunes to the utmost. The sovereigns 
of Europe found him an impossible neighbour. We 
have seen how in 1804 he carried off the Duke of 
Enghien and shot him, violating the territory of the 
Duke of Baden, with whom he was on terms of peace. 
In 1805 he abducted the English Minister at Hamburg 
and carried him off to Paris, him and his papers. This 
was no matter of a mere Rhenish Margrave and a 
French emigre, it concerned the plenipotentiary of a 
Great Power living under the protection of the German 
Emperor. In 1809 he seized upon the Pope — swooped 
down upon the Holy Father in his quiet Quirinal, 
drove him away, under military escort, to a prison, 
first at Grenoble, then at Savona, finally, in 181 1, at 
Fontainebleau. 

But of all his abductions, his sequestrations, none 
was so extraordinary as his retention, in 1808, of the 
whole royal family of Spain! Here Napoleon shows 
himself completely the brigand-chief. His prisoners 
were not interesting; never had the Peninsula sunk so 
low in point of prosperity, power, or influence as under 
the rule of Charles IV. The Bourbon King and 
Queen were like an odious caricature of Louis XVI 
and Marie- Antoinette : he, kind and loyal, but almost 
imbecile, incapable of any activity of body or mind, 
and hypnotized by his blind devotion to his wife; she, 
arrogant, energetic, dissolute, with only one thought 
in her head — the advancement and good pleasiure of 
her minister and favourite, the handsome parvenu 
Godoi, whom she had created Prince of Peace. Godoi 



288 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

was the tyrant of Spain, hated by the nation. The 
King's eldest son, Ferdinand, Prince of the Astiirias, 
rose in arms against the monstrous regimen of his 
mother and Godoi. The old King, bewildered, abdi- 
cated one day, recalled his abdication the next, and 
watched his kingdom drift into civil war. Then 
Napoleon invited the King, the Queen, the Prince of 
the Asturias, and the Prince of Peace, who had all 
appealed to his decision, to meet him on the frontiers 
of France and Spain; his master mind would cut the 
Gordian knot of a family quarrel. Too angry with each 
other to suspect this benevolent foreigner, the King, 
the Queen, the two Princes — all talking at once and 
very excited — arrived at the rendezvous. Napoleon 
gave them the wisest, the kindest advice; pacified 
the two rival Kings; induced Prince Ferdinand to 
abdicate in favour of his father; persuaded King 
Charles in his turn to abdicate — in favour of Napo- 
leon; and finally himself passed on the crown to his 
elder brother, Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples 
(whose throne, which this preferment left empty, would 
come in handy for Murat, who had married Caroline 
Bonaparte), 

When the despoiled, bewildered Bourbons would 
fain have turned their faces home, they found the 
frontiers closed. Princely pleasure-houses, ample in- 
comes, had been provided for them all in France, but 
there they must remain, while, in their stead, Joseph 
Bonaparte should cross the Pyrenees, Fontainebleau, 
Chambord, Valengay, Compiegne were set at their 
disposal. But they were captives. Prince of Peace 
and all ! In vain they protested. Spain rose in victo- 
rious insurrection, all her factions at once fused to an 
indignant unity at this insult to her national honour; 



NAPOLEON 289 

in vain Europe lifted hands of horror and England 
sent an Expeditionary Force to Portugal and Spain 
under a new young general, Wellington. Napoleon was 
not disturbed. For some time he had been anxious 
about his western frontier. The Empire appeared 
lopsided in its immense development; its eastern 
extent was now prodigious; Hamburg was the chef- 
lieu of the French department of the Elbe, Rome 
the capital of the department of the Tiber. But in 
the south-west the Pyrenean boundary was but a 
few days' march from Paris, It was a relief to behold 
Spain, at last, practically absorbed into the Empire. 
Napoleon wrote to his brother: "Spain is quite an- 
other thing, much better than Naples. It is a kingdom 
of eleven million inhabitants and a hundred and fifty 
millions of revenue, which places you at three days' 
journey from Paris and covers entirely one of our 
frontiers." 

Napoleon was satisfied. And yet that long, that 
harassing Peninsular War of Independence was really 
the beginning of the end. But he was much occupied 
in the North. The alliance with Russia had not 
proved durable. The blockade which was intended 
to starve and ruin England had incidentally stifled 
Russian trade; that choice of an Austrian princess 
had humiliated the enthusiastic Alexander, who had 
intended one of his own sisters to wear the French 
Imperial crown; and also Napoleon would not listen 
to the Muscovite dream of Constantinople and the 
Dardanelles: he meant himself to be Emperor of the 
East. War broke out between the two allies in 18 12. 
Here too, as in Spain, Napoleon made the mistake of 
underrating his adversary. The constancy and cour- 
age of the Spaniards in repelling a usurper had surprised 
19 



290 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

the great man, who esteemed them according to the 
supine indifference and shiftless idleness with which 
they had supported the yoke of the Spanish Bourbons. 
Neither could he guess that these inconsistent Rus- 
sians — the children of Europe, lovable and puerile — 
would show themselves - capable of burning their 
capital and devastating their provinces in defence of 
their country. Napoleon, like all the great men bom 
of the^ Revolution, could understand no patriotism 
but his own ; with the result that this heir of the 
ideas of '89 will succumb to a series of popular and 
national movements subversive of that "Roman 
Peace," that implacable Empire, which he sought to 
impose on all the races of Europe. 

The French public was not informed of these new 
Russian hostilities until some ten days after they had 
commenced. The nation received the tidings with a 
calm that masked something of the suUenness of de- 
spair. The wars had gone on for eleven years, and 
there was still no end in sight. "My men would 
fight for ever [said the Emperor] if they were not so 
fond of their families." Frenchmen are very fond 
of their families, of their fields and farms, their towns; 
they like, too, to turn an honest penny, to lay it by, 
to spend it wisely in some solid acquisition; to work 
like artists at their trades and to live sociably in a 
friendly society. This ancient life of France was 
imposvsible during the whole duration of the First 
Empire. 

In March, 18 12, Napoleon held his court in Dres- 
den; it was perhaps the proudest moment of his life. 
He stayed there all the spring and early summer. 
The Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, all the 
princes of the Confederation of the Rhine, formed his 



NAPOLEON 291 

following. Saxony, Westphalia, came and bowed 
down before him; Bavaria was his washpot, and over 
Wiirtemberg he cast his shoe. Every sovereign in 
Europe except the Sultan, the Russian Emperor, and 
the King of England was at his feet : " It was the great- 
est moment of my life!" he said on Saint-Helena. 

On the 22nd of June he declared war on Russia. He 
was in too great a hurry. He had learned at Dresden 
that he would have the support neither of Sweden 
nor of Turkey; he would have no allies in the north 
or on the east: "I was too hasty," he owned; "I 
should have stayed a year on the Niemen and, first of 
all, have made a meal of Prussia." Instead of that 
he pursued his old victorious plan: a dash, a pounce, 
a knock-down blow; and he seats himself in the capi- 
tal of the conquered enemy, slashes with his sword a 
slice or two from the fattest part of their territory, 
imposes himself as suzerain inclined to a Pax Romana. 
. . . AU went at first according to promise: Napoleon 
crossed the Niemen, gained a battle at Smolensk, 
another on the Moskowa, and entered Moscow in 
September. But there, instead of dictating terms and 
imposing conditions, he found a novel state of things. 
The Russians, as we know, burned their ancient capital. 
He encountered emptiness, void, desolation. He was 
there like a man boxing with a moving shadow: the 
very strength that he put out ensured his fall. 

It is difficult to understand why Napoleon should 
have lingered among the charred and blackened ruins 
of Moscow until after the middle of October. Prob- 
ably he hoped that Alexander would capitulate. 
"Our Emperor thought the war was over [wrote 
Segur]. Day by day he expected an answer from 
Petersburg. He nourished his hopes on his recollec- 



292 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

tions of Tilsit, of Erfurt. Was it likely he should 
have less influence over Alexander at Moscow? And, 
like all men who have long been lucky, he expected 
his desires to come true." But the master of the 
empty house still gave no sign of life. 

And the climate surprised the conqueror by its 
mildness. In his bulletin of the 14th of October he 
writes: " Le temps est encore heau,^' and even on the 
27th: "Le temps est superbe; les chemins sont beaux; 
c'est le reste de Vautomne.'" 

The Corsican could not dream how sudden, how 
fatal might be the change of the equinox, while the 
old Russian, Kutosov, smiled and said: "We have 
an ally worth all of Bonaparte's; his name is General 
Winter!" 

And Napoleon continues his letter: 

"C'est le soleil et les belles journees de Fontainebleau. 
Varmee est dans un pays extremement riche qui pent se 
comparer aux meilleurs de la France.^' 

On the 7th of November there came a sudden frost, 
and on the i6th the thermometer marked 18° Centi- 
grade below freezing-point; the roads were covered 
with a slippery glaze of ice; the French and German 
horses of the cavalry, the artillery, the transport, 
perished by thousands every night: thirty thousand 
of them in a few days (I am quoting Napoleon's 
bulletin), with the terrible result that the cannons, 
the waggons of munitions, all the commissariat 
stocks and stores, the provisions that accompany an 
army of six hundred thousand men, could no longer 
take the road and had to be destroyed, for the most 
part, in the midst of the wintry plains of Russia! 

That army, so fortunate and prosperous on the 
6th of November, was, ten days later, shorn of its 



NAPOLEON 293 

cavalry, its artillery, its transport service, alike in- 
capable of giving battle or of getting food. Between 
it and that frontier of the Niemen which they had 
passed so joyously in June stretched fifty days of 
dreary marching in unimaginable snow and slippery 
ice, while the Cossacks viciously harried them on all 
sides. When the pursuit ended on the western fron- 
tier, more than three hundred thousand men of the 
Grand Army had disappeared. 

The dispatch which brought this terrible news to 
Paris on the i8th of December, 18 12, concluded with 
these words, intended to reassure and to console: 
"His Majesty's health has never been better. It 
seemed heartless; but Napoleon knew his Paris. He 
must be alive and present. The Parisians only two 
days later, learned that the Emperor was in their 
midst. He knew that the magic of his presence alone 
could comfort and inspire his people in this calamity. 
He had heard in Russia of the unpopularity of the war, 
even when that war presented no reverses, and re- 
cently he had learned how, towards the close of Octo- 
ber, General de Malet had spread a false report of the 
Emperor's death, and had attempted to accomplish 
a Royalist coup d'etat. The thing had failed, Malet 
had been shot, and here was the Emperor, bringing 
bad news, it is true, but full of prestige and resource. 
Universal as was the desire for peace. Napoleon had 
but to appear in order to carry the day; in the course 
of four months he raised an army of 226,000 men and 
457 guns and hurried at their head to Germany — to 
Germany, where Prussia had already joined his ene- 
mies, where a new disaster might lose him the support 
of the Confederation of the Rhine, where Austria her- 
self seemed but a dubious friend. . . . 



294 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

"Toute r Europe marchait avec nous il y a un an; 
toute V Europe marche aujourd'hui contre nous,'' wrote 
Napoleon in a dispatch of this campaign; and he 
added that Europe always follows the lead of either 
France or England, But he did not despair of defeat- 
ing his arch-enemy, though still the seat of war con- 
tinued to contract, though the immense limits of the 
Empire began to shrink and shrivel. The battle was 
at Moscow in 1812; at Dresden, at Leipzig in 1813; 
in 1 8 14 the enemy are ravaging the fields of France! 
All the world was now in truth against Napoleon; 
at Leipzig the Saxons and the Wurtembergers had 
ratted and joined the enemy in the middle of the fight. 
The Bavarians, who yesterday had fought in Napo- 
leon's cohorts, attempted to stop his retreat and to 
bar the passage of the Rhine. France was invaded 
— north, south, and east — by more than seven hun- 
dred thousand men eager to avenge the defeats and 
disasters which all the nations of Europe, save England, 
had suffered at her hands. 

From Frankfort, in November, 1813, the Allies sent 
an envoy to Paris offering to treat if Napoleon would 
accept as a basis the "natural frontiers" of France: 
the Rhine, the Alps, the Mediterranean, and the 
Pyrenees. This was all the Revolution had ever 
claimed; this was all that in his youth he had gone 
out to win; the rest was over and above. But Napo- 
leon could not dispense with that magnificent super- 
fluity. He refused; and the nations pressed round 
him again in battle; again his Empire dwindled and 
tottered; again they offered terms. This time the 
limits were narrower; he must renounce Belgium and 
Savoy. But even so, the France he could have kept 
was the old glorious France of the monarchy. Napo- 



NAPOLEON 295 

leon must have lost the balance of his reason when 
he refused to make peace. At last began that Cam- 
paign of France which was as brilHant, as marvellous, 
as heroic, but not as successful, as his first campaign 
in Italy. Wherever he fought he triimiphed, but 
wherever he was not his generals were beaten. The 
army, in truth, was exhausted, worn out; and, more- 
over, Napoleon, in the fifteen years of his fighting them, 
had taught his art to his enemies. 

The Emperor himself was no longer what he had 
been. The very thin man had become a very fat 
one. His mental energy, still capable of lightning 
flashes and surprising darts, would sink sometimes 
into a sort of lethargy, a morbid and feverish activity 
alternating with a strange listlessness. He had be- 
come garrulous and discursive. In fact, his youth 
was past. He had said at Austerlitz to one of his 
generals: "One has but a short time for war. I am 
good for another six years, and then I shall have to 
stop." He had spun the six years out to eight. But 
now he had to stop. 

As the armies of Eiuope marched on Paris, Napo- 
leon decided to fight his last battle under the walls 
of the capital. But before he could bring up his 
forces, Paris had capitulated to the Tsar. 

In Paris, Alexander met again his old friend Talley- 
rand. While Napoleon at Fontainebleau was send- 
ing a message of surrender to the Allies, the minister 
he had disgraced was negotiating the future of France 
with the sovereigns of Europe. In his hotel of the 
rue Saint-Florentin he treated with the enemy as 
Great Power with Great Power, recommending the 
return of the Bourbons to the exclusion of Napo- 
leon and all the persons of his family. The ex- 



296 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

Emperor had hoped for a Regency and the eventual 
succession of his infant son. But as Marshal after 
Marshal forsook the hopeless cause that last hope had 
to be abandoned. The little King of Rome, dethroned, 
proclaimed merely Prince of Parma and Duke of 
Reichstadt, was to receive his education at the court 
of his grandfather as became an Austrian Prince. 
Marie-Louise was to return with her little boy to 
Vienna. Napoleon himself was to receive the Empire 
of Elba, a small island off the coast of Tuscany, be- 
tween Leghorn and Corsica. One after another, the 
Bonapartes vanished from the scene of affairs, richly 
pensioned off in their golden obscurity. On the 4th 
of April, Napoleon's Marshals — Ney, Oudinot, Le- 
febvre, Macdonald — forced him to accept these terms 
of peace; on the 6th he signed the Act of Abdication, 
and the Senate proclaimed the reign of Louis XVIII. 
In his despair Napoleon attempted to poison him- 
self — at least that old legend, once discredited, is 
again accepted by recent historians. And surely 
some warrant is given to it by a phrase in the adieux 
of Fontainebleau; and also in that line of the Act of 
Abdication where the ex-Emperor declares himself 
"prU & quitter la France, et meme la vie, pour le hien 
de la patrie." But Napoleon had not yet run his 
course. A wonderful, a miraculous adventure was 
still in front of him. Life seemed over; but the future 
had its secret to impart. . . . Meanwhile, after a 
long spell of dreary waiting in his dull, deserted palace, 
on the 20th of April at Fontainebleau he bade fare- 
well to his soldiers of the Old Guard: "All was not 
lost while you fought by my side, but the war would 
have gone on for ever, would have degenerated into 
a civil war, and France would have lost her prosperity. 



NAPOLEON 297 

I have sacrificed my interests to those of the country. 
I am going away. 

"And you, my friends, will go on serving France. 
The happiness of France is all I think of, the one de- 
sire of my heart. Do not pity me. If I have consented 
to survive, it is to serve your fame. I mean to chron- 
icle the great exploits we have achieved together. 
Adieu ! Farewell, my children, my comrades, farewell ! 
Forget me not!" 

And so Napoleon set out for Elba, an island some 
two hundred kilometres square, containing two little 
towns and seven villages. The modern Charlemagne 
was Emperor of this principality, ''en toute souverainete," 
and the Treaty of Fontainebleau guaranteed him an 
income of two millions of francs — £80,000 — never 
paid. 

He has wished us Adieu. We may wish him Au 
revoir! 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Same as preceding chapter; especially Vandal, Sorel (vols. vi. 

and vii.), Fisher, Lavisse, Kermoysan, Chateaubriand. 
Thiers: Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire, t. viii. 
Lord Rosebery: Napoleon: The Last Phase. 
Marquis de Segur: La Campagne de Russie. 
Emile Bourgeois: Manuel Historigue de Politique Etrangere. 

Those who like to find in fiction the living reflection of a historical 
period may read with pleasure and profit: 

Balzac: Une Tenebreuse Affaire, Le Medecin de Compagne. 

Sainte-Beuve: Volupte. 

Paul Claudel: L'Otage. 

Stendhal : La Chartreuse de Parme. 

Victor Hugo: Les Miserables. 

Tolstoi: War and Peace. 

These are much more than historical novels; they are histories. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE RETURN OF THE BOURBONS 

Eight days after the departure of Napoleon for his 
microscopic Empire of Elba, the Count of Artois 
entered France at Nancy as Lieutenant-General of 
the Kingdom; the first of the royal princes to leave 
France, he was also the first to return. Though some- 
thing of a fool and not overfond of risking his skin, 
Artois was every inch a royal figure, handsome, ele- 
gant, generous. He was at once very religious and 
essentially frivolous; devout, noble, courteous, there 
was enough of the knight about him to please the 
taste of a romantic age (and we are just coming to 
the Romantics), but Fate was unkind to Artois in 
bringing him into power; he was cast by Nature for 
the part of a Pretender and had not learned how to 
play the King. 

Chateaubriand dubbed him "the Christian Knight," 
and added, "he has aged a good deal since I sketched 
him thus, but there is still a Hkeness." Poetic stories 
were rife concerning him — how, for instance, on the 
death of Madame de Polastron he had sworn never 
to love another woman, and had kept his word, mere 
Lothario as he had been until then. He was as full 
of prejudices, and obstinacies, and ignorances, as a 
charming narrow-minded Prince may be on the shady 
side of fifty. 



THE RETURN OF THE BOURBONS 299 

His brother was a very different person. The 
staunchest Royalists quailed a little when they thought 
of Louis XVIII entering critical and half-disaffected 
Paris as the successor of Napoleon. Artois had been 
first and foremost in all the Royalist intrigues, but 
at least you knew where you had him. There was 
something selfish and neutral about the sceptical 
Louis, generally inclined (like his brother, Louis Seize) 
to think that in every question there was a great deal 
to be said on both sides. Naturally Liberal, the cir- 
cumstances of his life in exile (hunted from refuge to 
refuge as the advance of Napoleon dislodged him from 
Poland, from Prussia, from Italy) and the haunting 
memory of his murdered kinsfolk had fostered in him 
incoherent rancours and sudden transitory rages little 
less violent than his brother's convictions. Such ex- 
plosions were rare; all these chances and changes 
had developed in Louis XVIII a certain moral indiffer- 
ence, a detachment from men and things, an absence 
of belief in anything, a disenchanted misanthropy, 
natural under the circumstances in a prince whose 
experience had been so cruel and whose nature was 
shrewd, wise, delicate, intelligent, but bitter and small. 
A quoter of Horace, a lover of letters (perhaps an 
author under the rose), this fastidious, gouty, and 
indolent valetudinarian saw himself promoted to the 
stormiest throne in Europe. 

Louis XVIII accumulated in his person all sorts of 
reasons why Paris should dislike him. Some of the 
citizens could remember how Monsieur had solemnly 
sworn never to leave the kingdom in February, 1791, 
and had successfully decamped in June. The soldiers 
knew that he had fought with the Prussians at Vakny 
(he had more physical courage than his brother), 



300 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

when the first victory of the Republic had put him 
and his emigres to the rout. And for years now he 
had Hved in England, returning in the unpopular 
character of a country squire from Buckinghamshire, 
a gouty old Anglais of sixty, impotent, enormous in 
bulk, his helpless legs wrapped to the knees in wadded 
gaiters. Ignorant of the recent growth of France, 
he was, however, dignified and liberal in mind. He 
had not lived so many years in England for nothing. 
His first act was to grant a Charter, that is to say a 
political constitution which established in France the 
Parliamentary system, ensured the liberty of pubUc 
worship (while declaring the Catholic Church the 
religion of the State), professed all men equal before 
the law and the tax-collector, admitted in a certain 
degree the liberty of the Press, confirmed the existence 
of Napoleon's new nobility, recognized all the debts 
of the State, whatever their origin, and guaranteed 
the holders of confiscated estates in the possession of 
their lands, by whomsoever forfeited. It was a Charter 
informed with the spirit of '89. But the King returned 
to France surrounded by a world of emigres who would 
die rather than countenance that spirit. Far more 
than the King, and even more than Artois, they had 
learned nothing and forgotten nothing. 

What were the feelings of the French when the Allies 
with their triumphant armies escorted the Bourbons 
to Paris? 

The prospect of peace, so long desired in vain, made 
at the first blush any change appear acceptable. 
Twenty years of constant battle had exhausted the 
nation; and the last two wars — Russia, Spain — had 
brought home to the people the terrible conviction 
that, under Napoleon, peace would never be attained, 



THE RETURN OF THE BOURBONS 301 

since he would fight for the pleasure of it, for mere 
conquest and magnificence, in spite of the despair of 
his subjects. Doubtless the first movement, at the 
fall of Bonaparte, was not unlike that which saluted 
the fall of Robespierre. There were those who, like 
Necker's daughter, Madame de Stael, said openly that 
the defeat of Bonaparte meant the happiness of France. 

But when the people of Paris saw the conquering 
armies — those armies they had been used to vanquish 
— marching proudly through their streets, there came 
a sudden revulsion of opinion. Listen to the same 
Madame de Stael: 

"When I saw Paris occupied by their foreign armies, 
ignorant of our language, our history, our great men, 
and the Tartar sentries pacing in front of the Tuileries 
and the Louvre, I felt a pang beyond endurance!" 

Chateaubriand, another enemy of Bonaparte, who, 
like Germaine Necker, had returned to Paris in the 
train of the Allies, shall be our next witness : 

"I own [he says] that I dreaded the first impression 
produced by the King." 

The impotent old gentleman from Buckingham- 
shire was so strange an equivalent for the terrible, 
adored, and dreaded Emperor. Yet above those 
swollen feet, those legs muffled in their ludicrous 
gaiters ci Vantigue, above that huge belly, that un- 
wieldy frame, there was a firm, pink face, not un- 
handsome, rather noble; an eye witty and wise, an 
expression of unruffled majesty; Louis XVIII had no 
doubts as to his rights or his reception : he was merely 
the First Monarch in Europe returning home. 

And this is what Chateaubriand saw at his entry, 
on the 3rd of May, 18 14, when the King went to Notre 
Dame. 



302 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

To spare the sovereign the spectacle of a foreign 
army occupying his capital, the streets were lined with 
the soldiers of Napoleon's Old Guard. And they 
contemplated the man who had vanquished their 
Emperor : 

"I think I have never seen on any human visage 
an expression so threatening, so terrible, as I saw on 
all of theirs. These grenadiers, the conquerors of 
Europe, covered with wounds, deprived of their leader 
and forced to salute an old King invalided, not by his 
victories but by his years, under compulsion of the 
Russians, Austrians, Prussians, who occupied Napo- 
leon's invaded capital. . . . Some of them, frowning 
under their huge fur busbies till they masked their 
eyes, affected not to see their sovereign; others drew 
down the corners of their mouth in the bitterest 
grimace of contempt and rage; and there were some 
who snarled like tigers, their teeth gleaming through 
their fierce moustaches. When the time came to 
present arms, their aspect was such as to make the 
mere spectator tremble." 

It was a strange Paris; white scarves and ribbons 
fluttered everywhere; in the streets, the quaint, shabby 
figures of the imigrh, hastening home from all the 
corners of Europe, greeted each other with a courtli- 
ness of phrase and a grace of gesture unknown to 
the magnificent barbarity of the Empire. The streets 
were full of Cossacks, Pomeranian Grenadiers, and 
diplomatists from every court. There were as many 
sovereigns in Paris as during the palmy days of Empire, 
but, though Louis XVIII slept in the bed of Bona- 
parte, the real king of Paris was Alexander. The 
two monarchs were on less enthusiastic terms than 
France and Russia had been at Tilsit and at Erfurt; 



THE RETURN OF THE BOURBONS 305 

the haughty calm of Louis displeased the young auto- 
crat who had brought him back from exile. 

Thrones fall, Republics are reversed, emperors ban- 
ished, kings come to their own again; the surface of 
French history appears a sequence of whirlpools; 
and yet life continues, and France has to be admin- 
istered, and in fact is administered, with a continuity 
of order which at first sight appears miraculous. Be- 
hind the fagade of Sovereignty (which so often tumbles 
down and has hastily to be replaced in another style) 
there is a solid block of building which contains 
the Government Offices. The King and Artois knew 
nothing of the needs and requirements of the France 
they revisited after a lapse of thirty years; since their 
departure the country had been subject to many a 
phase of power — the Republic, the Reign of Terror, 
the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire, — and had 
survived them all, thanks to the admirable Civil 
Service working steadily in the background. And 
fortunately there still remained in France two minis- 
ters, who had been through most of these administra- 
tions, men of great capacity, one of whom at least 
had the advantage of being personally known to the 
Allied sovereigns. These were Talleyrand and Fouche. 
The King of France refused at first the services of 
Fouche, who had voted the death of Louis Seize and 
was in part responsible for the massacre of the Royal- 
ists at Lyons under the Terror. But he accepted the 
ministry of Talleyrand, a man of birth and breeding, 
on whom B. P. (this was the King's graceful fashion 
of alluding to his predecessor: Buona Parte) had 
conferred no additional honour when he dubbed him 
Prince of Benevento. 

Talleyrand had been for five-and-twenty years a 



304 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

moving force in French history. We saw him first 
on the Champ-de-Mars when, as Bishop of Autun, 
he said the Mass of Federation before the King and 
the assembled people; a little later he organized for 
the Constituent Assembly a scheme of popular educa- 
tion; next he was Danton's colleague and collaborator; 
under Robespierre he had fallen into disgrace — and 
no circumstance could better have favoured his for- 
tunes in 1 8 14; he had been a pillar of the Directory, 
and yet he had helped to overthrow it in order to 
establish the Consulate; in 1797 he was Bonaparte's 
counsellor and confidant : between them they arranged 
the invasion of Egypt, and throughout the first glori- 
ous years of Empire, Talleyrand had administered 
the conquests of Napoleon; then came their quarrel 
in 1 8 10; and here was Talleyrand back again and the 
Emperor at Elba. 

Talleyrand had now in front of him the most diffi- 
cult task of all his career. After a preliminary treaty 
at Paris, it was decided that the sovereigns and states- 
men of Europe should meet in Congress at Vienna 
in order to divide among themselves the spoils of 
Napoleon's Empire. The Allied armies in their thou- 
sands continued to occupy France, while the French 
continued to hold some fifty European citadels, in- 
cluding such strong places as Hamburg, Antwerp, 
Mantua, the fortresses of Belgium, the Rhine, and 
Piedmont. There was still the magnificent remnant 
of the French army. It is just possible that the coun- 
try might have made better terms than were offered 
for the Treaty of Paris. But France panted for peace 
with a sort of exasperation; the foreign armies were 
there, in possession: Cossacks, Russians, Austrians, 
Croats, Germans, Prussians, English — dangerous ten- 



THE RETURN OF THE BOURBONS 305 

ants, each with their wrongs to avenge. It was better, 
if possible, to remain with them on amicable terms. 
Besides, Talleyrand's manner was seldom the ^^maniere 
forte''; he was yielding, insidious, perfidious, claiming 
nothing, yet little by little filching, appropriating, a 
great deal. Nothing could have been humbler than 
his advent at the Congress of Vienna. 

He was no longer the brilliant host, the great states- 
man of the rue Saint-Florentin, who had housed the 
Emperor Alexander as his guest. The abjection of 
France was expressed in his very mien. He repre- 
sented a sort of poor relation of the Great Powers 
whose bankruptcy was putting them to a great deal 
of trouble. Humble, serviceable, amiable, Talleyrand 
was content with anything they offered; his great 
phrase was: "La France ne demande rieni" In the 
Ambassadors' saloon the four Great Powers — England, 
Austria, Russia, Prussia — confabulated apart; by an 
insolent protocol they had arranged that they alone 
should distribute the spoils of Napoleon, while France, 
so to speak, was left to wait outside in the hall with 
Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, Naples, the Netherlands, 
Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Saxony, Denmark, and Sweden. 
In this humiliation Talleyrand found his opportunity. 

He reverted to the classic policy of France, the 
policy of RicheUeu, which always has been to consti- 
tute the King of France the champion and elder 
brother of the smaller sovereigns; and as Richelieu 
had opposed this following of small States to the mighty 
agglomerations of Austria and Spain, so Talleyrand 
intended to counterbalance the Four in council by a 
sort of League or Entente of the lesser thrones. . . . 
Who on some country hillside has not seen the kestrel 
or the cuckoo put to flight by a flock of doves or 



3o6 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

swallows? The true policy of France has always been 
to neutralize, ruin, or disperse the great agglomera- 
tions in order to secure the advantage of the secondary 
Powers. 

While Talleyrand consulted his companions in ex- 
clusion, the mighty Four (who thought to dispose of 
Europe at their own sweet will) found it increasingly 
difficult to agree among themselves. A general con- 
flagration appeared imminent. The King of Prussia 
wanted Saxony, which Russia was half inchned to 
let him have in exchange for his share of Poland; 
Austria meant at all costs to regain her suzerainty in 
Italy. Talleyrand, as spokesman of the smaller Pow- 
ers, could not have cornered a united Four. He found 
them almost at daggers drawn, and profited by the 
occasion to reintroduce Prance into the Upper Room 
on equal terms as a welcomed fifth — welcomed, that 
is, by two of the disputants — while he organized, with 
a view to balancing the friendship between Russia 
and Prussia, a new and surprising entente between 
Austria, England, and France. 

A war between the two Leagues appeared close 
at hand; Bavaria, Wiirtemberg, and the Netherlands 
signified their adhesion to the Franco-Austrian -English 
Alliance: "The Coalition of the Four is destroyed 
[wrote Talleyrand to Louis XVIII]; France marches 
with two of the greatest Powers in Europe, with three 
secondary States, and others will join us: all those 
whose principles and maxims are opposed to the 
Revolution. France is the soul and the leader of a 
union formed to put in practice the principles she has 
proclaimed." 

In fact, Talleyrand was radiant, so far as that cold 
and distant face could reveal an emotion. But one 



THE RETURN OF THE BOURBONS 307 

evening in March, at a ball given by Mettemich, he 
was seen to turn paler than ever. He had received 
news — troublesome, distracting news. It was evi- 
dent that the cards would have to be reshuffled! 
Indeed, when he had imparted this surprising message 
there was an end of all debate and rivalry between 
the Powers, who during six months had quarrelled 
and bargained interminably. There was some ques- 
tion of war indeed. But not war among themselves. 
The lion had got loose! Napoleon was in France. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Vaulaeelle: Histoire des Deux Restaur ations, t. ii., Hi., iv. 
Chateaubriand: Memoires (with Edmond Bird's notes), t. iii., vi. 
Emile Bourgeois: Politique Etrangere, t. ii. 
Talleyrand: Memoires, t. ii., iii. 



CHAPTER V 

THE HUNDRED DAYS 

One day, at the Congress of Vienna (so the story- 
goes), the statesmen there assembled were discussing 
anxiously the unrest in Italy, when Lord Wellington, 
seated beside a great round table on which was spread 
a map of Europe, cast his eyes negligently over the 
chart of Italy: "Good God! [he exclaimed] — how 
close Bonaparte is to the Italian coast! There will 
be no peace in Lombardy so long as he is at Elba." 

Was it (as Savary, Duke of Rovigo, declares in his 
Memoirs) a foreign officer, an admirer of Napoleon, 
who left Vienna for Elba in order to tell the Emperor 
that the AlHes contemplated moving him further afield? 
Was it the Prince Eugene, betraying the confidence 
of Alexander, who informed his step-father of a pro- 
ject in the air? The transportation of Napoleon was 
a theme so openly debated at Vienna that the news 
of it may have reached him from more sources than 
one. At any rate, it is certain that he believed in 
a plot either to assassinate him or to kidnap him on 
the part of the Allies; he had abducted so many per- 
sons himself that he knew the scheme might enter 
the sphere of practical politics. Was he to suffer the 
fate of the Duke of Enghien? 

Napoleon had occupied the first months of his exile 

308 



THE HUNDRED DAYS 309 

in organizing Elba. He was there — like Prospero 
in his isle, like the prophet in his chamber on the 
wall — just on the marge of a world which he did not 
cease to survey. 

But funds soon ran short. The yearly two mil- 
lions of francs guaranteed by the Allies were never 
paid, for the canny King Louis XVIII took a malign 
pleasure in letting the ex-usurper taste the pleasures 
of poverty in exile: "Chacun son four!'' Napoleon 
had to borrow from a banker in Genoa the sum which 
permitted him to fortify his isle, place batteries along 
the coast, improve its artillery, and lay in a store of 
provisions and ammunition : the Allies and their press- 
gang should have no easy task! This occupied a week 
or two. Then time again began to drag. "My 
island is very small!" sighed the Emperor of Elba. 

No news of wife or son. But his mother and the 
lovely silly sister he preferred came to keep him com- 
pany. They brought news. News, indeed, perco- 
lated through from every quarter: how unpopular 
the Bourbons were; how the Allies meant to drive 
Murat from Naples; how Austria was regaining all 
the old ground in Italy; how France was as priest- 
ridden, the nobles as powerful, the people as dis- 
satisfied as if the Revolution had never taken place: 
one-sided, inaccurate news enough; but it served to 
occupy and to infuriate the exile. 

Meanwhile, in Milan the malcontents cried " Vive 
VEmpereurl" (and did not mean the Emperor of 
Austria), and in France they cried: ''Vive le Roil'' 
(and added low: "de Rome"). 

On the 22nd of February, 1815, a certain M. Fleury 
de Chaboulon arrived in the island of Elba and had 
a long interview with Napoleon. The Emperor saw 



310 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

him again on the morrow. This talk with Fleury 
was doubtless only the last drop that causes the vase 
to overflow. Napoleon was already at an end of his 
patience. The same impulsive temperament which 
had made him hurry on so many an event — rush into 
the hall at Saint-Cloud during the deliberation of 
the Cinq-cents, risk his life by his return from Egypt 
when he ran the blockade, gallop home so often from 
Spain or Russia on receipt of bad news — now sent 
him on a more tremendous quest before the times 
were ripe! 

How mad an enterprise to dare, with the nine 
hundred men of his guard, the united armies of Europe, 
all still maintained on a footing of war and mobilized, 
when the nations assembled at Vienna had so many 
causes of quarrel among themselves as would supply 
half a dozen international conflicts! Had Napoleon 
known how to possess his soul in patience until his 
enemies were safely by the ears, he might yet have 
died a regnant monarch. 

"Had I waited twelve hours longer [he said on Saint- 
Helena to Montholon], I should have been in posses- 
sion of news which would have caused me to delay!" 
But his genius was of that sort which is not a long 
patience; Buffon's definition was not true for him. 
"Had I waited fifteen days, the news of my arrival 
would no longer have found the sovereigns all assembled 
in Vienna." But his nature was such that on the 
very morrow of that conversation with Fleury, in 
which he had fixed his departure for the ist of April, 
he set sail for France with the nine hundred soldiers 
at his disposal, in the solitary gun-boat which com- 
posed his navy and three small trading vessels at 
anchor in the port. It was the 26th of February. 



THE HUNDRED DAYS 311 

On the way they passed a French cruiser, that 
remarked nothing extraordinary in their trim . ' ' How's 
the Emperor?" shouted the captain, seeing they 
hailed from his island (where there is a considerable 
trade in iron). Napoleon seized the speaking-tube: 
"Oh, he's all right!" he replied — "// va d merveille T' 
His spirits and his hopes were high. 

The sequel sounds like a page from the Legende des 
Siecles: the landing near Cannes and the bivouac 
in a garden of olives; the startled peasants hurrying 
to the scene and the village mayor who says reproach- 
fully to Napoleon: "We were just beginning to enjoy 
our peace and quietness, and here you come to disturb 
and unsettle us again." ("Words," added the Em- 
peror, "which pierced me to the heart." ) And then 
the apparition of the courier of the Prince of Monaco 
who comes riding by in his gold-laced vest: Napoleon 
recognizes him as an old equerry of Josephine's, and 
inquires of him as to his probable chances. "The 
workmen and the soldiers are for you [says the horse- 
man], but not the others, and don't count on Provence." 
In order to see how the land lies, the Emperor dis- 
patches to Antibes five-and-twenty grenadiers under 
an officer, to announce his return and bid the garrison 
open their gates; but the time drags on, the grena- 
diers are seen no more of, being detained in prison 
at Antibes. Then comes the Prince of Monaco in 
person (astonished to find himself of so much impor- 
tance vis-ci-vis to Napoleon). "Where are you going?" 
"Home," said the little Prince. "So am I!" said 
Napoleon. His opinion asked, the Prince prophesies 
no easy triumph, but civil war, the people being for 
Napoleon, the governing and intellectual classes for 
the King. Then the Emperor leaves the plains, the 



312 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

rich disaffected country, and takes to the mountains, 
making for Grenoble, the cradle of the Revolution. 
There he is received with enthusiasm; next at Lyons; 
and on the 20th of March, at four o'clock in the morn- 
ing, just eleven months after his sad farewell to the 
Old Guard, he arrived at Fontainebleau. His nine 
hundred soldiers had not yet discharged a single rifle. 

Until the middle of the month, the King in Paris 
had treated "B. P.'s" escapade with sovereign indif- 
ference. When the aerial telegraph brought to Paris 
the news of Napoleon's arrival in Provence, the King 
tossed aside the dispatch : 

"Take this paper to the Minister of War and tell 
him to do what's necessary" — the necessary being 
evidently to set the madman against the nearest wall 
and order a platoon to fire. 

"It's a plot," said the King — "It's a conspiracy," 
said the court. It would have been folly, they said, 
to feel the least uneasiness. Next thing, they heard 
Napoleon was at Lyons. 

On the 15th of March, the King announced to the 
two Chambers that on the morrow he would commu- 
nicate his intentions. A throne was prepared in the 
Palais Bourbon; the King, the royal family, the 
Marshals, the ministers, and the two Chambers were 
united. Louis XVIII arose, and in an affecting speech 
declared that he would gladly give his life to defend 
the Charter and the Constitution which at last had 
brought liberty to France: ''Tai revu ma patrie. . . . 
Tai travaille au bonheur de mon peuple. . . . Pour- 
rais-je, d soixante ans, mieux terminer ma carriere qu'en 
mourant pour sa defense?'' These words were received 
with a storm of enthusiasm. The King and his brother 
embraced; the princes and the legislators cried as 



THE HUNDRED DAYS 313 

with one voice: "We will live and die for the King 
and the Constitution!" 

And no doubt Louis's instinct would have led him 
to stay in Paris, but his lymphatic, indifferent nature 
made him often the tool of his ministers. If he had 
stayed in Paris it is doubtful if Napoleon would have 
gained an entrance there. But those about the King 
thought too much of his safety and too little of his 
honour. After all, it was natural; Louis XVIII was 
the brother of the unhappy Louis Seize, So at mid- 
night, on the 19th of March, the royal travelling 
coach drew up before the portal of the Pavilion de 
Flore; and the old King left the Tuileries, infirm and 
suffering sorely from his gout, leaning heavily on the 
arms of his ministers. The night was wild and wet; 
the rain fell in torrents; the wind extinguished the 
flaring light of the torches. Louis would have no 
escort; alone he set out in the darkness at the full 
speed of his equipage for Flanders, where he made a 
halt at Lille, and finally for the town of Ghent. 

Twenty-four hours after this midnight flitting, 
Napoleon slept in the King's bed in Paris. 

Thus, in twenty days' journey, without a shot fired, 
the Emperor exchanged his villa in Elba for the Tui- 
leries. It is perhaps the most wonderful expedition 
in all history. But from the moment of his entry 
into Paris, Napoleon felt a certain chill fall across 
the quality of his greeting. Throughout the Hundred 
Days he was never completely sure of Paris. Under 
the Charter, Paris had tasted of liberty. The stifling 
despotism, the forced assent, the mailed fist of the 
Imperial Administration had been removed, and Paris 
— quick-witted, critical, sensitive, artistic Paris — had 



314 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

breathed again and had soon accepted the Bour- 
bons. What did it matter if they were a little ri- 
diculous: the fat King in his red velvet gaiters; the 
awkward mannish Dauphine in her straight up-and- 
down white English frocks and unbecoming close 
bonnet? They were good honest folk who let a petu- 
lant city say its say. Paris had no great wish to go 
to school again. 

In fact, the France of 1814 had two faces, like Janus, 
the one looking towards the Past, the other eagerly 
envisaging the Future. There was a popular, heroic 
France, the child of the Revolution, the heir of the 
Empire, patriotic to the innermost fibre of the soul, 
martial and simple, which was mortified to the quick 
by the invasion of the Allies. To this France Louis 
XVIII was odious. 

But there was a new France whose eager appetites 
were not all for glory; a France which, after the huge 
interruption of the Revolution and the Empire, longed 
to resume the tasks and experiments in letters, in 
science, in industrial organization, which had occupied 
the middle years of Louis XVI. In 18 14, the steam- 
boat existed already in America; in 1 8 14, George 
Stephenson was constructing his iron horse; in 1814, 
James Watt was elected a member of the Academic 
des Sciences in Paris. There was a France intensely 
occupied with spinning- jennies and chemical experi- 
ments, that dreamed of vast factories and the renewal 
of the world by organized industry. There was a 
France, voiced by Chateaubriand and Madame de 
Stael, that knew itself capable of a magnificent revival 
in art and literature, a France that felt itself the equal 
of the Classic Age, though so long curbed and stifled 
and silenced by the Empire. And this France dreaded 



THE HUNDRED DAYS 315 

and hated Napoleon, because its ideal was beauty, 
cultiu-e, wealth, prosperity, and peace. 

If sometimes this France_had dreamed of a change 
of dynasty, it was not in favour of the Emperor. At 
most, the infant King of Rome, under a complacent 
Regency; better still, the Dtike of Orleans, young 
Louis-Philippe, whom every one declared so charming, 
so wise, so Liberal. The sovereigns and statesmen 
assembled at Vienna were much of the same way of 
thinking; Louis XVIII was held to have disqualified 
himself by abandoning his kingdom in the hour of 
need. Besides, he had grievously offended the Tsar 
in 1 8 14 by what Alexander deemed his Bourbon inso- 
lence: the autocrat of Russia had offered his sister 
as a bride for the heir of the French throne, and Louis 
had let him understand that the Romanoffs were 
people of no birth, that the Princess was a heretic, or 
at least a schismatic, and that there was madness in 
her family. Alexander was already considerably dis- 
enchanted when in the spring *of 1815 he learned at 
Vienna that plan of Talleyrand's and King Louis's to 
found an alliance between England, France, and Aus- 
tria — an alliance evidently intended to keep Russia in 
her proper place. Small wonder, then, if the Tsar en- 
visaged a new arrangement of the monarchy in France. 
He inclined to the candidature of Louis-Philippe. Other 
Powers supported the King of Rome. As for Napoleon, 
all agreed that he was impossible. 

Meanwhile the Emperor was making his last des- 
perate bid for success. His eagles, which had flown 
from village spire to village steeple all the way from 
Cannes to the capital, had (as Chateaubriand puts it) 
fallen exhausted among the chimney-stacks of the 
Tuileries: Napoleon in Paris perceived that he was 



3i6 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

no longer the idol of the nation. His one chance was 
to conciliate the malcontents of every party until, 
by some brusque act of power, he could bind them or 
fuse them in a party of his own. He went warily at 
first — ^much as he had pensively picked his path in 
politics on his return from Egypt — striving to accom- 
modate the Imperialists of the army, the Republicans 
of the working class, and even those anarchists of 
every shade whom in his heart he held in horror. 
Soon — too soon, no doubt — he showed his hand. On 
the 23d of April he published an Additional Act to 
the Constitution of the Empire — an act which was in 
fact, under another name, the Charter of Louis XVIII. 
''Here [he seemed to say] am I, a constitutional mon- 
arch, quite reconciled with Liberty and Peace. Behold 
me at the head of a Parliamentary Government, 
perfectly ready to march with the times." 

It was but a means of gaining time: the Emperor 
confessed in later years that, had Waterloo been a 
glorious victory for the French, he would soon have 
sent his Chambers to the rightabout. And even as 
an expedient it proved a poor tool. The patriots 
were disgusted; they had hoped for a Republic. The 
army was alarmed at this extension of the civil power. 
The Bonapartists deplored all these Liberal conces- 
sions and said Napoleon was growing old. And the 
Monarchists and the Liberals were neither convinced 
nor conciliated. The Emperor felt, with a sense of 
bewildered insecurity, that his magic worked no more; 
his old prestige had vanished. 

Still, a great victory which should avenge France 
and redeem the long humiliation of the past year 
might renew the charm and re-establish the power. 
Napoleon was not without hope that he might yet 



THE HUNDRED DAYS 317 

detach Austria and England from the circle of his 
enemies; he, too, had heard of that projected league, 
the last word of confidential diplomacy — and, like 
most such mysteries, the secret of Polichinelle : Punch's 
secret that everybody knows. To Austria, therefore, 
and to England he wrote, protesting his desire to 
keep the peace and his acceptance of the restricted 
frontiers of France. But neither Emperor nor King 
would take his word. 

So then he must fight them all ! And where was his 
army? 

Louis XVIII had left the treasury full; not in vain 
had he practised a policy of peace and retrenchment. 
France is naturally so rich and so economical a country 
that, if her sovereigns will but leave her alone, she 
recovers, incredibly soon, from the most savage bleed- 
ings of her army surgeons. So, after one brief year 
of Louis's humdrum calm there was no lack of money. 
And neither would there be any lack of men, for every 
Frenchman is born a soldier, if time were granted to 
equip and train the troops. Napoleon reckoned that 
by the ist of October he could place in the field an 
army of eight or nine hundred thousand men. 

Unhappily for him, Europe was armed to the teeth: 
what a specially bad time he had chosen to come 
back! By the middle of May, Bliicher was on the 
Meuse and Wellington on the Scheldt; the Russians 
were expected on the Rhine in June. And Lord 
Castlereagh was telling the Commons that, first and 
last, the Coalition could count on twelve hundred 
thousand soldiers. Already more than half of this 
niimber were ready to strike. 

Napoleon had in hand between five and six hund- 
red thousand, of which not half were fully armed, 



3i8 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

instructed, and equipped; many were absent, in foreign 
garrisons; not two hundred thousand were in France, 
ready to take the field. And of these he had to detach 
30,000 men to quell a new rising in Vendee. But 
could he wait ? Could he let the enemy cross the fron- 
tier and begin over again the campaign in France? 

It was clearly his best chance to beat the Prussians 
and the English before Austria and Russia were ready 
to take the field. Napoleon was a master of speed, 
secrecy, surprise. Notwithstanding the overwhelm- 
ing numbers of the Allies, it was just possible that he 
might succeed: pouncing suddenly on the two adver- 
saries, crashing right through their point of junction, 
faUing on them, so to speak, with both fists and ham- 
mering hard till one fell stunned to the right and 
t'other to the left — this bold and brilliant plan was 
probably the best that a small, highly trained force 
could execute against two large but less coherent 
armies. But it needed the Napoleon of yesterday. 

And Napoleon was no longer that. He had no 
longer the same force, the same passion, the same 
power of work. He had come back from Elba im- 
mensely fat, discursive, somnolent, oddly acquiescent 
in the slackness, the baseness, the faint-hearted treach- 
eries of mediocre men. Things that would have 
driven him to fury in 18 10 now scarce awoke a smile. 
He knew that Fouche was betraying him to his ene- 
mies, yet he found it convenient to retain Fouche as 
Minister of Police. He trusted very few, if any, of 
his Marshals: had they not all abandoned him? But 
he worked with them without reproach. His indul- 
gence was infinite. In fact. Napoleon was growing 
old. He was in his forty-sixth year. 

Nevertheless, in flashes the old genius illuminated 



THE HUNDRED DAYS 319 

him still — the old unmatched decision, mastery, and 
brilliance. The sudden silent swoop with which he 
brought his armies across the frontier; the manner 
with which he arrayed this vast ambush — masked by 
low hills and the frontier fortresses — within a few 
leagues of an unsuspecting enemy, are worthy of his 
inspired campaigns. On the 14th of June, 1815, a 
hundred and fifteen thousand men, three hundred 
and fifty cannon, were drawn up, unrevealed, between 
Philippeville and Maubeuge, and if, on the mor- 
row, the treason of General Bourmont revealed their 
presence to the Prussians, the English were still 
unprepared. 

SOURCES CONSULTED: 

Same as before, especially Vaulabelle, Chateaubriand, Rosebery, 

Fisher, Napoleon's Letters, Memoirs of Montholon, Gour- 

gaud, Las Cases. 
Henri Houssaye: 1815. 



CHAPTER VI 

WATERLOO 

In order to understand the fight at Waterloo, it is 
better, I think, not to have visited the field of battle, 
which I remember — forty years ago — as a pleasant 
rolling plain. Landscapes change, and here the can- 
non, the woodman's axe, the plough, have been at 
work. In 1815 all the country round Saint- Amand 
was so thick with trees that it appeared a forest when 
looked at from a distance: a land of bosky fields, 
deep lanes, and hidden villages, admirable as a cover 
for troops. These wide, wavy valleys, which follow 
each other like billows and rise to the forest of Soignes, 
appeared deeper far when their ridges were fringed 
with trees. It was through a wooded country that 
Napoleon crept invisible till, on the i6th of June, he 
fell on the Prussians just beyond Fleurus, as the 
panther springs on its prey. 

His plan, as we know, was to attack the Allies at 
the point where their forces joined, to cut them in 
two, as one cuts through the waist of a hornet, to 
fling the British on Hal and the Prussians on Tongres, 
and then, rushing on Brussels, before they had recov- 
ered' that first stunning blow, to throw the Germans 
beyond the Rhine and the English into the sea. After 
that the Emperor could reflect and determine what 
to do next. Ligny is the first act of Waterloo. 

320 



WATERLOO 321 

Early in the morning on that i6th of June the 
cannon boomed three times in the direction of Flenrus. 
That deep salutation was succeeded by the strains 
of fife and drum, a great noise of singing, an endless 
acclamation, a prolonged roar which, as it approached 
Saint-Amand, resolved itself into the words "Vive 
VEmpereurl" The Prussians, hidden in the bosky 
hedges and orchards of the village, remained motion- 
less, silent, until the first line of the French was seen 
nearing the church and the graveyard. Then the 
invisible Germans let loose, as from one rifle, a rolling 
fire of musketry. The French dashed on in a superb 
bound forward, and soon every barn, garden, outhouse 
was a scene of carnage, and men were knifing each 
other's ribs with unfixed bayonets in a struggle too 
close for rifle-fire, from the eaves to the cellars of 
every cottage in Saint-Amand. 

This first day's fight could only be what it was: 
a thundering onset, a crashing attack, a position 
carried by decision and surprise. Bliicher and his 
eighty thousand men were thrown back from Saint- 
Amand and Ligny, having suffered terrible losses. 
Their retreat left the English flank uncovered, and 
Wellington was forced to withdraw in good order on 
Waterloo. 

The furious cannonade of Ligny had surprised the 
English. Wellington was not quick or ready: the 
battle of Waterloo is the battle of the hare and the tor- 
toise. On the very day when Napoleon entered 
Belgium, Wellington was writing a long dispatch to 
the Emperor Alexander proposing a new plan of cam- 
paign for the invasion of France. Little did he dream 
that his enemy was already in the gate! On the eve 
of Ligny he still suspected nothing, and it was at the 



322 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

Duchess of Richmond's ball in Brussels that the English 
Commander-in-Chief and his Staff learned the news 
of Napoleon's presence between Charleroi and Ligny. 
But which of us does not remember the scene in Vanity 
Fair and in the Dynasts ? 

Ligny, one of the most terrible battles of the cen- 
tury, was a victory for the French, and might have 
been a decisive victory, but for a lack of energy and 
coherence in the carrying out of Napoleon's com- 
mand which was to have a sequel infinitely more 
important on the morrow. The French army, though 
it contained a great proportion of conscripts, had 
never been more ardent, braver. And Ney, Grouchy, 
Soult, d'Erlon, Girard, had fought victoriously on 
many a field beside their Emperor. What had robbed 
them now of their speed, their decision, their self- 
assurance, their certitude of victory? Was it the 
defeat and capitulation of 1814? Was it that they 
had, if not betrayed, at least abandoned, a year ago, 
their Emperor — their General of to-day? 

Or was it the absence of Berthier, Prince of Wagram? 
Berthier was no thunderbolt of war, no genius. He 
was the administrator of the battlefield. He saw 
that the orders were clear, that they were duly carried, 
and in sufficient doubles that one officer or more shot 
down by the way need not stop communications 
between the centre and the wings. He was an admir- 
able Major-General. Waterloo was perhaps lost by 
Napoleon for lack of the inconspicuous Berthier! 

''On a souvent hesoin d'un plus petit que soi." 

But Berthier, like the other Marshals, had capitu- 
lated to the Botirbons, and, on his master's sudden 
return, would not, like Soult and Ney, forsake the 
King for the Emperor, nor, like Marmont and Mac- 



WATERLOO 323 

donald, immolate Napoleon to the Bourbon King. 
Inextricably torn between his honour and his con- 
science, Berthier had refused to take either part, and 
had retired to Bamberg, where on the ist of June — 
just one fortnight before Waterloo — he had been mys- 
teriously murdered by masked assassins. . . . On 
which side did his ghost call down vengeance? 

Soult, who assumed Berthier's customary charge at 
Ligny and at Waterloo, was a General of rare military 
talent and a wise administrator, but one of those 
maundering, pedantic talkers who think any sharp, 
precise contour in speech incompatible with dignity. 
Instead of saying: "Send Erlon here! Bid Ney go 
there!" he indulged in generalities. Confusion was 
the result. General d'Erlon was sent from pillar to 
post, and during the whole arduous day at Ligny 
wandered up and down the battlefield, bringing his 
men to and fro, back and forth, between Napoleon 
and Ney, without placing them at the disposal of 
either. Worse still, acting on his own discretion in 
disobedience to orders, put off the attack on Quatre- 
Bras, where the Prince of Orange and Wellington 
were blocked with scarce eight thousand soldiers, until 
the Anglo-Belgians had time to bring up fifty thousand 
more. Worst of all was the inexplicable inaction of 
Grouchy, who, after prodigies of valour at Ligny, re- 
mained as it were stunned and passive during the 
two succeeding days. It was to this extraordinary 
attack of military paralysis that Napoleon himself 
attributed his defeat at Waterloo. 

Thus it happened that, owing to inefficient staff- 
work. Napoleon had been obliged to fight at Ligny 
without Erlon's force — indeed, without a single man 
from Ney's command. The Prussians had been 



324 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

forced to retreat, but they were not annihilated, as 
they should have been — indeed, they were not as 
"damnably mauled" as Wellington said and Napoleon 
supposed. 

On the morning after Ligny the rain fell in torrents 
. . . perhaps some day our physicists will tell us 
why it always rains after a great artillery attack; 
so far they have either denied the circumstance or 
murmured something vague concerning the ioniza- 
tion of the clouds. Waterloo, at all events, was no 
exception to the rule. The roads were so deep in 
mire that it was impossible to move the artillery much 
before noon. Yet the whole problem for Napoleon 
was a question of time: could he get at the English 
before the remains of the Prussian forces had time 
to recover and come to their assistance? The great 
thing was to learn which road had been followed by 
the German General in that retreat, which was not 
(as Napoleon still hoped and supposed) a rout. Grou- 
chy, with thirty-six thousand men, was told off to 
pursue the enemy and at all hazards to prevent his 
junction with the British. But Grouchy, after a 
march of five miles or so, stopped still, wasted all this 
day of the 17th. It is true the weather was so appal- 
ling that the troops in their rainsoaked clothes could 
barely move through the mud, and even when they 
moved could barely see. 

Napoleon's chief fear was that the English would 
escape behind the forest of Soignies, or Soignes. But 
the English had no thought of escaping! Wellington 
massed his men solidly and squarely in front of the 
forest on the strong position of the Mont-Saint-Jean, 
a low eminence eleven miles south of Brussels. And 
there he waited. . . . Late on the evening of that 



WATERLOO 325 

wasted day, the 17th, Napoleon paced his camp with 
the faithful Bertrand, turning in his mind many 
sombre thoughts and fears of a possible aggression of 
tne Austrians from beyond the Rhine, when he saw, 
as he thought, a forest fire in the direction of Soignies. 
It was the bivouac of the British soldiers, who, under 
the pouring rain, were trying to dry their coats before 
their smoky fires of green wood hacked from the trees. 

At five in the morning on the i8th of June a pale 
ray of sun lit up the sky, and the Emperor knew a 
gleam of joy: "We have eighty chances out of a hund- 
red!" he exclaimed. But the roads were still too 
wet for the guns. The battle had to be put off until 
almost noon. Napoleon's plan was to throw himself 
with the full force of his right on the English left, 
hammer at them, and throw them off the Brussels 
road, while at the same time shutting off the chance 
of retreat through the forest of Soignies. On his 
extreme right Grouchy, with his thirty-six thousand 
men, was to keep off the Prussians and bring up a 
reserve if wanted. On the left, Reille was to attempt 
a diversion on the farm of Hougoumont, a little in 
advance of the British right. 

Meanwhile Wellington awaited his attack. The 
decision to defend the Mont-Saint- Jean was taken 
upon the assurance of Prussian help. The British 
Commander had learned that Blucher's army was con- 
centrated at Wavre, a large village which lies some 
thirteen miles north of the field of Waterloo, and 
that he might count on them to open on the French 
right somewhere about noon on the i8th. 

Napoleon supposed the Prussians in full retreat to 
the east, harried in their rear by Grouchy's division. 
Had he suspected that ninety thousand Prussians 



326 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

were within four hours' march, and proposed reliev- 
ing Wellington in the course of the day, he would 
never have waited until thirty-five minutes past 
eleven in the morning before launching his attack on 
the Duke. 

At one o'clock, as the Emperor on his mound swept 
the horizon with his field-glass in search of Grou- 
chy's missing reserve, he saw a moving shadow. Not 
French! Prussians? Yes! Billow's corps, who had not 
served at Ligny. It was, he thought, but a single 
unsupported body, which, if Grouchy moved rapidly, 
might be caught between two fires and annihilated. 
But Grouchy was not in sight, and these ominous 
Prussians — waiting and watching for the advent of 
Bliicher's more considerable corps — hovered on the 
rear of the battle, still waiting, like a flock of vultures. 

Perhaps at that moment Napoleon ought to have 
disengaged his armies, retreated (as Bliicher had done 
at Ligny), left the ultimate issue for a happier hour. 
But was it possible? What reinforcements had he 
to hope for? Delay was all in favour of the Allies; 
their reinforcements were the innumerable hosts of 
Austria and Russia. Besides, the struggle was al- 
ready begun: French and English were at each other's 
throats in an inextricable medley. The crashing 
charge of Erlon's division at one o'clock left the Brit- 
ish infantry unshaken. Then came the turn of Mil- 
haud and his cuirassiers. Who does not know the 
story of their splendid onset as they stormed the Mont- 
Saint- Jean, riding like centaurs — three thousand cen- 
taurs — three thousand grizzled heads shouting: ''Vive 
rEmpereurf" Who has not heard how in the full 
shock of their furious charge they came on that 
sunken lane, the ravine of Ohain, and fell, one on the 



WATERLOO 327 

top of another, in the horrible trap ? But the middle 
ranks and the last gained the plateau on the further 
side, charging like mad, carrying all before them, the 
tails of their horses swishing through the tall wheat. 
Colonel Sourd, with six sabre-cuts in his right arm, 
dismounts while the army surgeon amputates it, and 
then leaps on his horse again and leads his men to 
the attack. "The Duke of Welhngton told me him- 
self [says Jomini in his Campagne de 1815] — he told 
me at Verona — that in all his experience of war he 
never saw anything more magnificent than the charge 
of the French cuirassiers at Waterloo." 

At that moment it was to no French confrere that 
the Duke was imparting his impressions, but to the 
incomparable British infantry who withstood that wild 
onslaught: "Steady, boys [he says]; what will they 
say of us at home if we are beaten?" There was no 
thought of giving way — the English never know when 
they are beaten. The battle was won by men whose 
motto has ever been: "'Tis dogged as does it." 

"The French cavalry was as close to us as our own 
troops," wrote the Iron Duke a little later to Lord 
Beresford. The moment came when the 5th British 
Division, reduced from four thousand to four hundred 
men, could no longer hold its position, and Welling- 
ton, seeing his brave soldiers hacked in pieces all 
round him, told them to fall where they stood, and 
never thought of yielding an inch of ground, though, 
as he sighed, "Night or Blucher alone can save us!" 

Meanwhile, Napoleon was in no less terrible straits. 
Ney, mad with battle, had led his cavalry charge too 
soon — at half -past three; the exhaustion of the horses 
made a further attack appear as yet impossible, and 
the English cannon had found the range: there were 



328 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

now great moth-eaten spaces and holes in the vast 
fiirry mass of the French busbies. . . . But the first 
British Hne is pierced, the second broken, though the 
third is intact. Oh, for a good, soHd regiment of 
infantry! Ney sends to Napoleon in utmost haste: 

''De Vinfanterie? [the Emperor answers]. Oil voulez- 
vous que fen prenne ? Voulez-vous que fen fasse? ' ' 

And, just as Wellington scans the landscape for a 
sign of Bliicher, he looks anxiously round: still no 
trace of Grouchy and his men! They might have 
disappeared in an earthquake! But the army does 
not yet guess at the Emperor's anguish. . . . The 
French soldiers had begun to cry " Victoirel" A mes- 
senger was riding post haste to Ghent to apprise 
Louis XVIII of the defeat of the Allies, when that 
cloud on the horizon began to move. The men cried: 
"Grouchy !" But the Emperor knew better. It was 
the Prussian army, under Biilow ! 

In order to win the battle he must, at whatever 
cost, crush the British before the arrival of Blucher, 
who was probably somewhere in Billow's rear. The 
mass of the French cavalry, twelve thousand strong, 
flung itself again in charge after charge on the English 
front, carrying at last the English guns and sweeping 
with desperate bravery round the unbroken squares 
whose fire thinned their ranks. Those indomitable 
squares remained unshaken! Never has greater cour- 
age been displayed, either in attack or in endtirance. 
The rivals were equally matched; for if either was 
to overcome, some new factor must be added to his 
strength. 

At half-past six, again that moving shadow on the 
sky-line! And again the soldiers of France shouted: 
"Grouchy! Grouchy!" 



WATERLOO 329 

But it was the bulk of the Prussian army, under 
Bliicher. 

Then the Imperial Guard, Napoleon's last reserve, 
which had taken no part in the battle, was drawn 
up in two huge columns of attack. Ney himself 
led the first — a Ney transfigiu-ed, drunk with battle 
and despair, covered with mud (he had been thrown 
from his horse), his coat pierced with bullets, his 
sleeve torn from the shoulder: a Ney wild, gesticulat- 
ing, shouting "Vive VEmpereur!'' And the column, 
sweeping all before it, floundering through heavy 
fields and pools of water, mounted the rise, touched the 
English front, and fell back, torn, shattered, by the 
terrible charge of the British musketry. Then broke 
the second wave, advancing with the same fury, rising, 
engulfing — only to be repulsed and scattered in its 
turn. 

By now it was nine in the evening: night began to 
fall. All these brave men had been fighting for three 
days. And at the moment when the Guard fell back 
exhausted, the French beheld the whole Prussian army 
massed on Napoleon's right, their guns sweeping the 
road to Charleroi. Wellington seized that moment 
to make a desperate advance: those imperturbable, 
shattering squares began to move forwards; all round 
the French now saw themselves hemmed in by those 
rows on rows of little red figures, no taller than low 
hedges, which were the British regiments and divisions ; 
and the troops of the Emperor saw that they were 
tiu-ned. From that hour all was lost. Terror, panic, 
confusion reigned in the ranks of the French; whole 
regiments fled helter-skelter in a wild sauve-gui-peut. 

But the Emperor's Old Guard still stood firm, in 
the midst of the increasing darkness. "Surrender!" 



330 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

cried the British, in a transport of pity and admi- 
ration. "Damn!" screamed the French General, 
Cambronne (for thus I venture to translate the 
unpronounceable oath which polite historians have 
paraphrased as "The Guard dies, but does not siirren- 
der"), and with a last cry: ''Vive VEmpereur!'' the 
heroic grenadiers rushed headlong on their death. . . . 

Napoleon was looking on in a sort of stupor. "They 
seem to have broken the ranks?" he muttered, as 
he saw his squadrons timibling head over heels in 
their mad rout. "All was lost [he was to write on 
the morrow] by a moment of panic terror, and [he 
added with the indulgence of a great captain] on sail 
ce que c'est que la plus brave armee du monde lorsqu'elle 
est melee et que son organisation n'existe plus/' The 
very soldiers at his side were caught in the whirlpool 
and swept away in that hopeless torrent. Then the 
Emperor gathered up his reins and, turning his horse, 
made for the sacrificed phalanx of the Guard and 
would have entered their column. But Soult, Duke 
of Dalmatia, laid his hand on the bridle: "Stop, 
Sire! Are not our enemies happy enough already?" 

Napoleon resists, and is wise to resist, for that 
would have been his fitting end. But Soult and the 
Generals drag him on the road to Genappe. There 
for a long moment he sits his horse, silent, motionless, 
deeply brooding; then orders an artilleryman to fire 
off his guns, and listens, for the last time, to that dull 
roar which has been the music of his life; at last he 
gives his bridle-rein a shake and sets off alone at full 
canter for Charleroi. 

On the 2 1st of June he was in Paris. He had been 
three days without eating; he was worn out. He 
had no longer the courage to daunt and dominate 



WATERLOO 331 

the Chambers: "Ah, mon cher, fetais battu." He 
was no longer the man of Brumaire, and when both 
Houses demanded his abdication, he was too broken 
to resist. Lavalette, his Postmaster-General, has left 
a record of the "fearful epileptic laugh" with which 
Napoleon greeted him on that 21st of June. The 
Emperor saw the game was up. Outside in the streets 
the people and the soldiers — two regiments and a 
mob from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine — were shriek- 
ing, adjuring him not to desert them, beseeching him 
to lead them against the enemy. Napoleon remained 
passive, inert. If there was one thing he adored even 
more than Power it was Order. He was afraid of 
Civil War, of Revolution. On the 22nd he signed his 
abdication in favour of his son, the King of Rome. 
He then offered the Provisional Government to serve 
France as a simple General under their command. 
The Government refused. Finally, as Blucher's Prus- 
sians were reported in the neighbourhood, he left 
Paris and made his way to the sea. 

His first idea had been to take refuge in those United 
States of America which were a second fatherland 
to the children of the Revolution. But the British 
cruisers scoured the Atlantic. So, making a virtue 
of necessity, the tracked and hounded autocrat of 
yesterday wrote to the Prince Regent announcing 
that "he came, like Themistocles, to seat himself at 
the hearth of the British people." Ah, why did not 
the English State, in a mood of generous and judicious 
irony, offer him that vacant Hall of Hartwell where 
Louis XVIII had passed his term of exile? Instead, 
as we know to our grief and shame, we stranded 
him on a sunbaked Devil's Island in mid-ocean, on 
desolate, dreary Saint-Helena. That and the flaming 



332 THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE 

stake at Rouen are oiir two crimes in History; we 
have had our own way of dealing with the heroes and 
heroines of France ! And I think it took the blood we 
shed of late in Flanders to wipe out the memory of 
that offence. 

Not like Themistocles, received with magnificence 
in Persia by the nobler adversaries of the elder age. 
Like Philoctetes, rather, left to perish on his lonely 
rock. 

In the twenty-year-long contest between the Revo- 
lution and Europe, the Dynasts score the final triumph. 
In France, in Spain, in Naples, the Bourbons re-ascend 
their thrones. 

Louis XVIII comes limping home to France, crutched 
on the armies of the Coalition; twelve hundred thou- 
sand foreign troops again overrun the departments, 
leaving behind them, when they retire — as a flood-tide 
leaves its fringe of mud and weed — an army of occu- 
pation, a hundred and fifty thousand foreigners, as 
a sort of Royal Guard destined to secure the King 
against a renewal of Revolution. The cost of their 
maintenance was added to the war-tax of seven 
hundred millions of francs contributed by France to 
the expenses of the campaign. The insolent, irre- 
pressible country appeared ruined, at least, if not 
reconciled. 

But military force has never yet been able to long 
prevent the expansion of a great poHtical ideal, and 
the task of the nineteenth century in France was to be 
the gradual and sure development of the notion of 
democracy. 

SOURCES CONSULTED; 
Same as before. 
Adolphe Thiers: Waterloo. 



EPILOGUE 

Not since Henry VI of England was crowned King 
of France in Notre Dame had the great nation suffered 
a humiliation so entire as during that Conference of 
the Allies which occupied Paris during the summer 
of 1815, in order to arrange the future of Europe and 
to assume the government of France. The defeat of 
1 814 had been nothing compared to this complete 
abasement. France lay prone — while her enemies 
yelped and bayed about her, each eyeing some juicy, 
tender morsel to set its fangs in, snatch asunder, 
and carry to its lair unreproved. 

The leanest States were the hungriest and the most 
pitiless: Prussia and the Germans, greedy beyond all 
bounds. Nothing was too small for them — they 
stripped the walls of the public picture galleries; they 
threatened to blow up the lena bridge, memorial of 
their defeat ("Do as you will," said Louis XVIII; 
"I warn you, I shall have myself carried on to the 
bridge in my armchair"); and no project for the 
dismemberment of France appeared to them prepos- 
terous. They would fain have had the kingdom oc- 
cupied for the space of seven years by an army of 
two hundred and forty thousand men; they wanted 
a war indemnity of twelve hundred millions; they 
claimed French Flanders, Alsace, Lorraine, Savoy, 
Burgundy, Franche-Comte, part of Champagne, and 

333 



334 EPILOGUE 

part of Dauphine. They wished to separate from the 
mother-country some four milHon seven hundred and 
sixty thousand souls; and, naturally, they required 
the fortresses : Dunkirk, Lille, Metz, Strasburg, Besan- 
gon, Chambery, at least. The very spirit of destruc- 
tion possessed them. 

Austria, indifferent, well-bred, looked on, mildly 
disapproving this excess of Prussian cupidity. For 
her own part, she was less exacting, proposing merely 
a return to the historical frontiers of 1790, an indem- 
nity of six hundred milHons, and the dismantling of 
the first line of French defences in Flanders and Alsace. 
Yet she did nothing to oppose the hungrier despoilers 
— hypocritically benign, secretly not a Httle ferocious, 
as is the wont of Austria. 

The unhappy King of France could do nothing. 
These furies who spoke of dismembering his kingdom 
were the Allies who had restored his throne. In its 
secret sessions the Conference had drawn up a map 
of France — of the miserable remnant left when all 
these avidities should be satisfied. Such mysterious 
meetings are never so occult as their members imagine. 
Somehow, their dim arcana are generally violated: 
a copy of the map came into the hands of the old 
King, sitting forlorn, unfriended, in his Tuileries. 
Louis XVIII, whatever were his faults, never failed 
in dignity: he sent for the Duke of Wellington, for 
the Emperor Alexander. He spoke first to the con- 
queror of Waterloo : 

"My Lord Duke, I thought on my return to France 
to reign over the kingdom of my forefathers; it seems 
that I was mistaken. WiU your Government, my 
lord, grant me a refuge if, for the second time, I ask 
the hospitaHty of England?" 



EPILOGUE 335 

The impulsive Alexander left the Duke no time to 
answer : 

"No! No! Your Majesty shall not lose those 
provinces. I will not suffer it ! " 

From that moment — perhaps before, else why did 
the wise old King send especially for those two repre- 
sentatives of his Allies? — but at any rate, certainly, 
from that moment France in her extremity saw two 
unexpected angels, two miraculous champions, detach 
themselves from the rout of her oppressors and stand 
by her side. They were Alexander and Wellington. 
At first they were much more Alexander and Well- 
ington than Russia and England, but that was to 
follow. 

Alexander was an autocrat who summed up in his 
person all the Russias; but Wellington (and Castle- 
reagh) had some difficulty and some merit in bring- 
ing the English at home round to their point of 
view. In their chivalrous action, as in Alexander's, 
there was more than the magnanimity that met the 
eye. 

The character of Alexander of Russia is one of the 
most interesting in modern history. Only a mystic 
coiild be at once so dreamily high-minded and so 
alertly practical; so ingenuous and so shrewd a cal- 
culator; so noble and so full of guile. Alexander 
was the Saint Francis-Xavier of nineteenth-century 
politics — more spiritualized than ever in 1815, being 
under the influence of Madame de Krudener and 
pledged to further the reign of Christ on earth. But, 
for the last year, he had looked with suspicion on the 
new importance of Prussia — of Germany: France, 
bounding these countries upon their further side, 
would be an incomparable ally for the government 



336 EPILOGUE 

of the Tsar. In the east, also, France might prove, 
for Russia, an excellent counterpoise to the influence 
of Great Britain. No; from every point of view, 
moral or mundane, it was clear that conquered France 
must not be too much enfeebled. 

Wellington and Castlereagh, meanwhile, were rumi- 
nating thoughts not wholly dissimilar. England, 
too, might want one day a friend in need, and 
who so handy as a neighbour? Especially did 
they dread too close an alliance between France and 
Russia. 

''The principal arguments of Castlereagh [wrote 
Gagern, the representative of the Netherlands] are 
the necessity of keeping Russia within bounds, for 
Russia has a kindness for France, and tends to an 
alliance, while England seeks to outlive her in generos- 
ity and moderation." 

Mais il y a la maniere. Alexander spoke from an 
impulse of the heart no less than from a deep political 
calculation. He had never forgotten those words of 
Talleyrand's at Erfurt: "The French nation is civi- 
lized . . . the sovereign of Russia is civilized. . . . 
Let the Emperor of Russia be the ally of the people 
of France." Alexander felt a moral duty of protec- 
tion towards the French, and in his then mood of 
Vicar of Christ on earth we may suppose that he 
regarded the distressful country as his lost sheep, 
whom he would bring back to the fold on his shoulder. 
After all these years the accents of his arguments are 
moving, as he complains of the Germans who degrade 
the cause of the Allies by their violence and their 
vengeance, their unmannerly avarice, their pretensions 
to Alsace and Lorraine — "Les Alsaciens repugnent d 
devenir Allemands." 



EPILOGUE 337 

"I entirely share your Majesty's opinion as to the 
extravagant character of the Prussian proposals," 
chimed in the Duke of Wellington. 

The Duke's task was not light, for, as I have said, 
he had to convert his Government at home, and above 
all to sway and manage that tremendous force, the 
British public, inclined to look on the French as a 
sort of Catholic heathen, little better than cannibals 
in manners and morals. "Take something," wrote 
Lord Liverpool. Wellington took as little as he could 
— ^filched a few works of art, and that with so bad a 
grace that he set the French against him while he 
barely calmed the folk at home ; but, in essentials, no less 
than Alexander j he stood the friend of France. "L'An- 
gleterre ne veut pas qu'il arrive de mat d la France," 
complains the German diplomatist, Gneisenau, in a 
letter to the poet Arndt, and he scarce knows what 
to argue from "une pareille perversite." But Welling- 
ton stood firm. He had not Alexander's mystical 
magnanimity, but he had a sportsman's liking for 
fair play, a soldier's fellowship for the adversary he 
had found it so hard to beat, a gentleman's dislike 
for the avarice of the Germans. Both he and Castle- 
reagh wrote to Lord Liverpool that the prosperity of 
France was England's advantage. 

Thanks to England and Russia, France was not dis- 
membered. She lost but a recent acquisition. Savoy, 
and a few frontier fortresses, not of the first rank — 
these last, which were French since Louis Quatorze, 
being cruel sacrifices. 

Still, mauled and mulcted, France was left alive, 
with all her limbs and all her faculties, organically 
perfect. Here let me quote again that verse of Ron- 
sard's which I have printed on my second flyleaf: 



338 EPILOGUE 

Le Gaulois semble au saule verdissant: 
Plus on le coupe et plus il est naissant, 
Et rejetonne en branches da vantage, 
Prenant vigueur de son propre donunage. 

The Gaul is like the verdant willow-bush f 
The more you prune, the more it's lithe and lush, 
Shooting a crown of branchy twigs all round. 
And draws new life and vigour from a wound. 

We know what life, what vigour, our pruned laurel, 
France, was to find in the nineteenth century — in 
Art, in Letters (for, just as we take leave of her, the 
first Romantics arrive on the horizon), in Science, too, 
with Lamarck, Le Verrier, Claude Bernard, Pasteur, 
and the rest; in Industry, in Social Science — and 
also in politics, tending ever more and more, as her 
history evolves, to that alliance which was foreshadowed 
more than a hundred years ago, in the tragic Paris of 
1815. 



INDEX 



Agincourt, battle of, 88 

Alaric the Goth invades Italy, 23 

Albigeois, crusade against, 70-3. 

Alexander, Emperor of Russia, be- 
comes, the ally of Napoleon at 
Tilsit, 281; excuses Napoleon, 
283; Talleyrand's advice to, at 
Erfurt, 286; and Talleyrand 
meet in Paris in 1814, 295 ; at the 
Restoration appears the real 
King of France, 295; his dislike 
of Louis XVIII, 302-3; shows 
himself the protector of France, 

335-7 
Alienor of Aquitame, see Aquitaine 
America, discovery of, 103 
Amiens,, peace of , 273; broken, 278 
Ammianus Marcellinus, praises 

the bravery of the Gauls, 8 
Anne de Beaujeu, Regent for 

Charles VIII, 106 
Aquitaine conquered by the Ro- 
mans, 3; by the Goths, 23-7; 
by the Franks, 30-1. 
Aquitaine, Alienor of — her inheri- 
tance renders impossible the 
unity of France, 78, 88-9; her 
influence on literature, 74 
Architecture, Gothic, 75-6 
Armagnacs, their policy, 85-7; 
declare for Charles VII, "the 
King of Bourges," 95 
Arthurian romances, 73-5 
Artillery, first used at Crecy, 80; 
rapid increase and importance 
of, lOI 
Artois, Comte d', attempts to 
rescue the King and Queen, 217; 
enters France as Lieutenant- 
General, 298; his character, 298 
Assemblee Nationale, its institu- 



tion, 179-80; follows Louis 
XVI to Paris, 188 
Assignats, in 1790, 194; in 1796, 

Attila, invades Gaul in 451, 26; 

his defeat at Chalons-sur-Marne, 

26 
Aubignd, Agrippa d', 118, 120 
Ausonius, the grandson of a Druid, 

9; his polidcal eminence, ii; 

describes Bordeaux in the fourth 

century, 13; his journey from 

Bordeaux to Treves, 28 
Austerlitz, battle of, 280 
Austria, the Girondin Ministry 

declares war on, 209; refuses to 

make peace, 254 
Austrian Empire replaces the 

Holy Roman Empire, 280 
Autun, the Druids' town, 9 



B 



Bale, peace of, in 1795, 248 
Barnave, his championship of Ma- 
rie-Antoinette, 203-4, Ills execu- 
tion, 243 
Bastille, fall of the, 182 
Belgian Gaul, according t>o Csesar, 

the bravest, 3 
Belgians at Waterloo, 323 
Belgium attributed to France by 
the Treaty of Campo-Formio, 
258; invaded by Napoleon in 

1815,319 . 
Berthier, Prince of Wagram, his 

talents as an administrator, 322; 

his tragic end, 323 
Blandine, Saint, martyred at 

Lyons, a.d. 177, 17 
Bonaparte watches the King and 

Queen abandon the Tuileries, 

210; summoned to defend the 



339 



340 



INDEX 



Bonaparte — Continued 

deputies of the Convention, 250; 
his appearance and bearing, 
250-3; invades Lombardy; 
his campaign, 255-9; the 
campaign in Egypt, 259-62; 
named First Consul after the 18 
Brumaire, 266; reorganizes civil 
life in France, 268-72; at- 
tempted assassination of, 274; 
(henceforth see Napoleon) 

Bonaparte, Lucien, his part in the 
coup d'etat of Brumaire, 264- 

5 
Bordeaux, described by Ausonius, 

13; characteristics of, 18 
Bordeaux, "the deputies of," see 

Gironde 
Bourmont, General, deserts Na- 
poleon on the eve of Ligny, 319 
Bretigny, treaty of, in 1360, 80 
Brumaire, dix-huit, 264-5 
Brunswick, Duke of, invades 

France to rescue the King and 

Queen, 212 
Buona-Parte, see Bonaparte 
Burgundy, the Duke of, Jean- 

sans-Peur, 86-90; his murder 

at Montereau, 89 



Cadoudal, Georges, his plot to as- 
sassinate Bonaparte, 275 

Caesar, Julius, describes the differ- 
ent races of Gaul, 4-6 

Calendar, Revolutionary, 244 

Calonne, de, minister of Louis 
XVI, 177-8 

Campo-Formio, treaty of, in 1797, 
258 

Capet, Hugues, elected King of 
France, 53 

Carolingian kings, 53 

Cathares, see Albigeois 

Catherine dei Medici, her Italian 
culture, 117; tries to play the 
two parties, 121; orders the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew's 
Day, 123 

Celts of Gaul, their language, 33 

Champagne, Marie de, and her 
court, 74 

Champ de Mars, the Mass of Fed- 
eration, 192-3 

Chanson de Roland, 65-7 



Charlemagne, his empire and ad- 
ministration, 45-7 

Charles IV of Spain detained by 
Napoleon, 287 

Charles Quint, a candidate for the 
Empire, 115 

Charles V of France, his wise reign, 
82-5 

Charles VI of France, his madness 
and his marriage, 85; his death, 
90 

Charles VII of France, "the King 
of Bourges," 92 

Charles VIII, his invasion of Italy, 
107-9 

Charles IX, his death, 123 

Charlotte Corday, 242 

Chateaubriand describes the re- 
turn of the Bourbons, 301-2 

Chivalry, 55-9 

Chretien de Troyes, 74-5 

Christianity, sudden spread of, in 
Gaul, 16 

Church, in Gaul, 16-20; heir of the 
Roman tradition, 15, 19, 31; 
invents the spirit of chivalry, 
57; hostile to the establishment 
of communes, 62-3; lands, con- 
fiscation of by the State in 1790, 
194 

Cicero and Seneca, the basis of 
Catholic education, 19-20 

Clotilde, the Christian wife of 
Clovis, 29 

Cloyis, King of Toumai, conver- 
sion of, 29; defeats Syagrius in 
battle, 30; conquers Aquitaine, 
30-1; founds a Christian 
Church in Paris, 32 

Coalition against the French Re- 
public, 235, 238; against the 
French Empire, 280-1; in 1814, 
294 _ 

Colbert, his administration, 144-5 

Commune of Paris, attempts to 
dominate the Convention, 237; 
votes an enforced loan on the 
rich, 239 

Communes, the communal move- 
ment, 60-4 

Confederation of the Rhine, 280 

Constantinople, conquest of, by 
the French, 68; conquest of, by 
the Turks, 102 

Constituent Assembly, inaugur- 
ates reforms, 188; dissolved, 207 



INDEX 



341 



Consulate, inauguration of, 266 

Convention, National, first meets, 
214; proclaims the Republic, 
215; summons Bonaparte to 
defend it, 250 

Cr^cy, battle of, 79 

Crusade against the Albigeois, 

70-3 
Crusades, 68-71 
Curie, a governing assembly, 43 



D 



Danton, passionately prepares the 
fail of the monarchy, 210; rings 
in the Commune insurrection- 
nelle, 213; assumes the direction 
of affairs, 226 ; his responsibility 
for the September massacres, 
227 
Desmoulins, Camille, 243 
Directory, inauguration of, 257 
Dormans, Milon de. Bishop of 
Beauvais and Chancellor of 
France, on the rights of kings, 
82 
Druids, 5; Caecilius Arbor, a noble 

Druid, 10 
Dumouriez, his treason, 237; sus- 
pected of a plot to assassinate 
the Jacobins, 241 



E 



Edward III of England, heir of 
Philippe-le-Bel, 78 

Enghien, Duke of, assassinated by 
order of Bonaparte, 274-6 

Erfurt, interview of Napoleon and 
Alexander at, 286 

Erlon, d'. General, his conduct at 
Ligny, 323 

Eurik, King of Toulouse, draws up 
a code of laws, 24; his scholar- 
ship and authority, 25 



F 



Farmers-General, their institution, 
145; their character, 145-6 

Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, 
his scheme for a reform, 153 

Feudal system, rise of, 47; its 
constitution, 48-52 

Fleury de Chaboulon, M., inter- 
views Napoleon, 309 



Fouch6, his mistrust of Napoleon, 
284-6 

France, Clovis founds the kingdom 
of, 30; kingdom of, its limits in 
the twelfth century, 67; its 
"natural limits," 248, 255, 258, 
272, 285, 289; its "historical 
frontiers," 296, 338; industrial 
and romantic Renaissance of, 
in 1814, 314-5 

Francis I of France, a candidate 
for the Empire, 115 

Francis II of Austria, 280 

Franklin, not loved at the French 
court, 172 

Franks, their origin, 23; Clovis, 
their king, founds the kingdom 
of France, 30; their language, 
35-6; the Frankish settlement 
in Gaul, 42-5 

French Empire in Constantinople 
and the East, 68 

Fronde, a toy Revolution, 139-40 

"Frontiers, natural," of France, 
254 



Gaul, Caesar invades and conquers 
it, 3-7; the Roman rule in Gaul, 
8-20; the Gauls distinguished 
from the Germans, 6-7 

Genevieve of Nanterre inspires the 
French to resist the invasion of 
Attila, 26 

Germans, character of, according 
to Cassar, 6; probable origin of, 

23 

Germany, see Holy Roman Em- 
pire 

Gironde, "the deputies of Bor- 
deaux," represents the pro- 
vincial spirit, 222; essentially 
law-abiding, 223; its decline 
and fall, 234, 239-43 

Godoi, Prince of Peace, 287 

Goths, their origin probably Bal- 
tic, 23; their kingdom of Tou- 
louse, 23-7; defeat Attila at 
Chalons, 26 

Grouchy at Waterloo, 323-8 



H 



Henry II of England, marries 
Alienor of Aquitaine, 78 



342 



INDEX 



Henry IV of France^his character, 
126; his policy, 126-30; his plan 
for a Society of Nations, 128 

Henry V of England, heir to the 
kingdom of France, 90 

Henry VIII of England, a candi- 
date for the Empire, 115 

Holy Roman Empire, rivalry with 
France, 115-6, 130 

Huguenots, Republican instinct of, 
1 18-9 

Hundred Years' War, 77-97 

Huns, their origin, 23; they invade 
Gaul, 26-7 



Isabeau de Baviere, Queen of 
France, 85, 87, 93 

Italy, French invasions of, under 
Charles VIII, 107-10; influence 
of Italian culture on France, 
no, 117; invaded by Napoleon 
in 1796, 255-9; s-iid again in 
1800, 272 



Jacobin Club, its institution, 224 
its character and influence, 225- 
6 _ 

Jacobins, their conception of pro- 
perty, 229-30; inaugurate a 
Revolutionary Tribunal, 239 

Jean-le-Bon, King of France, 80 

Jean-sans-Peur, Duke of Bur- 
gundy, 86-90 

Joan of Arc, 94-6 

Joinville, Sire de, his memoirs, 70 

Jornandes, the Goth, historian of 
the Goths, describes the defeat 
of Attila, 26 

Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples 
promoted to Spain, 288 

Josephine Beauhamais, marries 
Bonaparte, 254; crowned Em- 
press, 277; divorced, 282 

Julian, Emperor, failure of his 
attempt to restore the older 
faith, 13; likes Paris, 31 

Julius Caesar, see Cassar 



La Payette, his expedition to 
America, 171; heads the Garde 



nationale on its march on Ver- 
sailles, 186; Marie- Antoinette's 
dislike of, 200, 212; his political 
principles, 204; supports the 
monarchy, 207; tries to further 
the sovereigns' escape, 212; 
taken prisoner by the Austrians, 

237 
Latin culture and Catholicism, 19, 
20; scholarly and popular Latin, 

33-5 

Law Qohn Law of Lauriston), his 
scheme for reforming thefinances 
of France, 155-8 

Legislative Assembly meets, 207; 
its decrees against emigres and 
nonjuring priests, 207 

Ligny, battle of, 320-2 

Lorraine, a remnant torn from 
France by the grandsons of 
Charlemagne, 46; duchy of, re- 
verts to France on the death of 
Stanislas Leczinski in 1766, 160 

Louis VII, King of France, di- 
vorces Alienor of Aquitaine, 78 

Louis IX (Saint-Louis), ship- 
wrecked ofif Cyprus, 58; recon- 
ciles the burghers of Reims with 
their Archbishop, 63 

Louis XI, a bad man, 104-5; 
an admirable monarch, 104, 105 

Louis XIII, his partnership with 
Richelieu, 135 

Louis XIV, his ideal of a State, 
141; his love of glory, 142-3; 
small size of his armies, 143; 
his expenditure, 144; his death, 

^53 

Louis XV, his reign inconsiderable 
in politics, 161; considerable as 
a period of intellectual growth, 
161-6 

Louis XVI, his popularity on his 
accession, 168; his character and 
marriage, 168-9; his flight to 
Varennes, 200; his suspension, 
205; imprisoned with his family 
in the Donjon of the Temple, 
214; his trial and execution, 230- 

4 
Louis XVIII, see Monsieur before 
1814; his crown restored, 296; 
his character and experience, 
299-300; refuses the services of 
Fouchd and accepts Talley- 
rand, 303; leaves the Tuileries 



INDEX 



343 



Louis XVIII — Continued 

and flies to Ghent, 313; his 
indifference towards Alexander, 

315 

Louis of Orleans, brother of Charles 
VI, his policy, 85-7 

Lutetia, capital of the Parisii, more 
Christian than Roman, 29 

Lyons, the martyrs of, 17; char- 
acter of, 18; the massacres of, 
under Fouch^, 237 

M 



Malet's conspiracy against Na- 
poleon, 93 

Marat comes into note, 205; the 
soul of the Commune, 239 ; mur- 
der by Charlotte Corday, 242; 
idolized by the Parisians, 242 

Marcel, Etienne, his reform and 
revolutions, 81 

Marie- Antoinette, marries the heir 
to the French crown, 167; her 
character and tastes, 169-72; 
her trust in the Coalition, 211; 
describes the character of Louis 
XVI, 212 ; her execution, 243 

Marie-Louise of Austria, marries 
Napoleon, 282; retires to Vienna, 
296 

Milan, claims of Louis XII to, 
109; entry of the French under 
Bonaparte, 256; regained by 
Bonaparte, First Consul, 272 

Mississippi, Law's Company of 
the, 157 

Monsieur, afterwards Louis 
XVIII, 209 

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, Sire 
de. III; acquainted with Lord 
Bacon's brother, 112; perhaps 
of English origin, 1 12 

Mountain, the, why so called, 222; 
policy of that party, 223-4 

Murat, Joachim, with Bonaparte 
defends the deputies of the Con- 
vention and brings forty cannon 
to Paris, 253 



N 



Napoleon proclaimed Emperor, 
May 18, 1804 (for all events 



previous to this date, see Bona- 
parte), 277; proposes to invade 
England, 280; decrees the Con- 
tinental Blockade, 281 ; marries 
the Archduchess Marie-Louise, 
282; kicks Volney in the stom- 
ach; his violence, 285; abducts 
the English Minister at Ham- 
burg, 287; carries off the Pope, 
287; sequestrates the entire 
royal family of Spain, 287; ex- 
tent of his Empire, 289; declares 
war on Russia, 291 ; holds his 
court of sovereigns at Dresden, 
290; enters Moscow, 291; his 
retreat from Russia, 292; his 
campaign against the Coalition 
in France, 295; change in his 
physical and moral nature, 295 ; 
his abdication and farewell, 296- 
7; receives the Empire of Elba, 
296-7; his eleven months' 
ennui at Elba, 309 ; his return to 
France, 310; his triumphal pro- 
gress to the Tuileries, 31 1-3; 
he promulgates the Additional 
Act, 316; he leads his army into 
Belgium, 319; is defeated at 
Waterloo, 320-30; his second 
abdication, 331; offers to serve 
the Provisional Government as 
a simple General, 331; in de- 
spair gives himself up to the 
English, 331; is sent to Saint 
Helena, 331 

Napoleon Bonaparte II (the King 
of Rome) born, 282; is brought 
up at Vienna, 296 

Necker, 177-8 

Ney, at Waterloo, 322-9 



O 



Orleans, Louis, Duke of, brother 
of Charles VI, 85-7 

Orleans, Philippe, Dtike of, Re- 
gent of France for Louis XV, 
153; his character, 154; his 
adoption of Law's scheme, 155- 
8; inaugurates a Liberal policy, 
159 

Orleans, Louis-Philippe, Duke of, 
as Duke of Chartres serves with 
Dumouriez' army, 216 



344 



INDEX 



Paris, becomes the capital of 
Prance, 31; supremacy of, dur- 
ing the Revolution, 222, 225 

Paulinus of Nola, preaches pa- 
cifism, 14; and solitude, 18 

Paulinus of Pella, his ideal coun- 
try-house, 12 

Pichegru, General, strangled in 
prison, 277 

Poitiers, battle of, 80 

Printing, discovery of, 102 



R 



Rabelais, iio-ii "■ 

Reims, the Commune of, appeals 
to Saint Louis, 63 

Religion, wars of, their political 
character, 117-26 

Remy, Saint, Bishop of Reims, 
taptizes Clovis and three thou- 
sand Franks, 29 

Richelieu, Armand Duplessis, Car- 
dinal de, his patriotism, 133; 
his policy, 134-5 

Rivoli, campaign of, 257 

Robespierre, Maximilian, foresees 
the modern conception of the 
State, 239-40; the cult of Paris 
for, 245 

Robespierre, execution of, 246 

Roman Empire, its sphere and 
organization of conquests, 8-20 

Russia, see Alexander; retreat 
from, 292-4 



Saint-Bartholomew's Day, mas- 
sacre of, 123-4 

Saint Helena, 331 

Saint-Just, his political philoso- 
phy, 235 

Salt tax, abuse of, 147 

Sidonius Apollinaris, describes the 
court of King Eurik the Goth 
at Toulouse, 24-5 

Smith, Sydney, his ruse to rid him- 
self of Bonaparte, 261 

States-General of France, con- 
stituted and summoned by 
Philippe-le-Bel in 1302, 64; meet 



in Paris in 1356, 81 ; meet in 
Paris in 1614, 133; meet at Ver- 
sailles, May 5, 1789, 178-9 
Syrian colony at Lyons in the first 
century, 16 



Talleyrand and Fouch^, their mis- 
trust of Napoleon, 284-6; min- 
ister of Louis XVIII and con- 
cludes the first Treaty of Paris, 
304; his conduct at the Congress 
of Vienna, 305 

Theodoric the Goth, wins the 
battle of Chalons, 26 

Thermidor, coup d'etat, 246 

Tiers-Etat institution of, 64; de- 
mands a programme of reforms, 
176; its importance in 1789, 179 

Tilsit, interview of Napoleon and 
Alexander at, 281 

Toulouse, the kingdom of, 21-7 

Trafalgar, Nelson destroys the 
French fleet at, 281 

Troyes, treaty of, in 1420, recog- 
nizes Henry V of England as 
heir to the crown of France, 90 

Truce of God, 56 

Tuileries, the mob attack the, 213- 

4 
Turgot, 176-7 



Valmy, Kellermann's volunteers 

defeat the Prussians at, 228 
Varennes, flight of the King and 

Queen to, 200-2 
Vauban, Marshal, his scheme for 

reform, 153 
Venice, sacrificed by Napoleon at 

the treaty of Campo-Formio, 

259 
Versailles, the building of, 148 
Veto, the King's privilege of, 190 

"Monsieur and Madame," 209 
Vienna, Congress of, 304-7 
Villehardouin, his Conquest of 

Constantinople, 70 
Visconti, Valentine, bequeaths to 

the French King her claims to 

Milan, 109 
Visigoths, see Goths 



INDEX 



345 



w 

Waterloo, battle of, 320-30 
Wellington, sent to oppose Na- 
poleon in Spain, 289; represents 



England at the Congress of 
Vienna, 308; at Waterloo, 320- 
30; shows himself unexpect- 
edly the protector of France, 
335-7 



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